Bitcoin Is Time
dergigi.com
dergigi.com
"Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)"
What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this.
The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind.
It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.
I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?
Some of these memes become elevated into conscious actions. For instance, people cynically exploit "Linux can't do X" to get help for X. But some memes are unconscious and I think "I'll be downvoted for this" or "Get out of here with your facts and reason" or "Source?" are definitely examples of these.
Personally, I think many of the privacy and security comments are also memes that propagate through mimicry of success, but that's its own thing.
Any invitation to downvotes, I take. Any comment about downvotes, means at the least that I won't upvote that comment. Meta-comments about downvotes are exempt, I would probably upvote this comment if I saw it from someone else.
Every person who adopts this policy improves the discourse by discouraging this behavior, please consider it!
However, people wanting feedback beyond mere downvotes is legitimate and downvoting without comment is the actual wrong here IMO.
IMO the best scheme here is that you _must_ provide a reason to downvote. People who vote for your reason [ie they agree with you about downvoting the parent] should be the actual downvotes.
This way instead of apparently arbitrary downvotes one gets a list of reasons with scores (HNs score hiding aside, though they'd still be ordered) indicating their relative worth as reasons for downvoting.
That is actionable. Under K2I that would allow everyone to tailor their contents to the audience if they wished, or at least understand the audience's approbation.
tl;dr I downvoted you ;o) ... except I didn't because your comment has value even if I disagree !
Funny thing, when I went to quote the specific HN guideline, I'm almost certain it used to say "Please don't comment about downvotes. It never helps" or something very much like that.
But the current guideline says:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Which we're all in violation of! I'll do my best to follow this rule in the future.
So far I have reverted only once on HN.
According to OP's comment, it has received 76 - 11 = 65 karma as of now.
Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.
What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter!
I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving.
But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives.
The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
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 payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.
If Bitcoin succeeds, I don't think it is likely the average person will ever touch Bitcoin: it is technically complex to handle it securely. However, many of the Venmos and Squares in this future would likely be using Bitcoin to settle flow disparities behind the scenes.
In terms of what it's solving:
- Bitcoin has a much lower barrier to entry. It is very expensive and slow to get direct access to the ACH system (vs having your bank make transactions on your behalf).
- Bitcoin is apolitical. Banking and finance is still very much an old-boys network of after hours handshake deals. Bitcoin lets you swim with the big fish without having to worry about kissing the right asses. Similarly to claimed noble benefits of public markets, Bitcoin has a democratizing effect by not having a mechanism to favor entrenched players.
- Bitcoin is insulated from US monetary policy. This tends to appeal to gold-bug types who believe inflation is being underaccounted and will get worse.
- Bitcoin is permissionlessly auditable. I wish there was more development in this space, but I think bitcoin could be very powerful for non-profits and other organizations which want to be as transparent as possible with their finances. If an organization wanted to prove holdings or transactions, Bitcoin is arguably better than bank-money because Bitcoin txns cannot be forged, while documents being alleged to be coming from a bank could. (Similarly, I think it would be really cool for a bank to make an option for fiat accounts to have their balances and transaction history published publicly online)
* I am certainly not speaking for all Bitcoin advocates
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.
As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation.
And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
When I was still in consulting, I had dozens of clients whose projects were killed when their Chinese investors could no longer get their money out of China to invest. A billion building sits unfinished across the street from Staples Center in LA (and has, for 3 years) because the developer can't get its money out of China to finish the building.
Thousands of local buyers are able to buy houses and condos in LA these past 3 years because they don't have to compete with all-cash foreign buyers any longer.
Big claim. Source?
Its non-Chinese foreigners getting deals in LA now that China is sandbagged. If you don't see all the other foreign money buying LA then I am not surprised you are no longer a consultant.
Lastly what do you think of US capital controls such as OFAC?
I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder.
And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over.
So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front.
The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for moving value on the internet, that is not useful enough for you sir? Is this hacker news? or lumberjack news?
Besides, Horses >>>> Cars. Horses are more useful than Cars. Cars need roads to work, Horses don't.
What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)
There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders.
efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank)
reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it.
ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty
fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
Horses are also dangerous. A friend of mine lost almost all of their teeth because their horse kicked them in the face when they cleaned its hooves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
Not saying cars are great, but it was seen as the solution to exactly this problem
Horses need to be operated safely, just like cars, you need to learn how to ride them. Besides, if you can't ride a horse, sit in the carriage.
Over a million people die every year in automobile related accidents.
It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing.
Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars.
You're making a solid point.
Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity?
Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-introduce equine transportation on a mass scale (where would you park them in a city designed for automobiles?), but we need to think long and hard about the world view that led us to conclude cars were universally superior to horses. I suspect the argument comes down to "productivity", and the axiomatic belief that it should be maximized in all circumstances.
I think your comment actually is wise.
Some recent reporting on it from NatGeo:
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-euro...
My point was that they have become adapted to a point where it is very difficult to re-adapt them to horses.
That does not invalidate the point that cars _are_ highly pollutant and shouldn't be the primary means of transportation in any sustainable society.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319996 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319974 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319558
In all seriousness though, we should at least move to electric cars.
If that is acceptable we already have electric money (bitcoin), it'll fix most of our pollution problems. We don't have to worry about how much oil is being consumed to secure the petrodollar network. I've been waiting for a better argument against bitcoin for a long time, I haven't heard any yet.
Most people who criticize bitcoin don't even understand it fully. My belief is that as people look deeper into it, they will be convinced by themselves. It has been generally true among my friends, including myself. I have gone through those phases of criticism (energy usage, funds terror, governments will ban it, it will be hacked, quantum computers will destroy it). As a software engineer, I think the system is beautiful, if you are one by profession (or not), I implore you to study it.
If you just replace "horses" with "mass public transit", "railroads" and "electrobikes", it suddenly starts to make much more sense.
Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage)
How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time?
Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goes wrong obviously, but likewise horses need vets.
The day-to-day stuff like refueling a car is dead easy, meanwhile you can't just ignore your horse in the stable for a week because you didn't feel like going anywhere then fill it up on the way to your destination...
Edit response because I'm rate limited:
It seems you're not joking with the tone you're taking. I feel bad for you.
Our world would be much better off if we all lived in cities like NYC. Ten years ago average New Yorker generated 30% less CO2 than the average, and greenhouse emissions from the city were trending downward as economic activity trended upwards.
But yeah, I guess you're just enlightened past living near other people and shame on anyone who's comfortable enough with human contact to live in a city.
For all your posturing it's ironic you'd balk at "living in a crowded place"... the 30% in CO2 we'd save by living in cities like NYC is more than if we got rid of all forms of transportation in the US. Meaning simply by living in a city I don't really need to play ridiculous mental gymnastics like, but it's fun to tear down a bad argument.
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You're privileged enough to have an existence where taking care of a horse is easy and "therapeutic" I'm sure all the people barely making ends meet working 2 jobs would have just as easy a time filling up their car in 5 minutes as taking care of a horse.
I wonder what percentage of Americans have and additional 2 to 4 hours every single day just burning a hole in their pockets
And let's not forget the fact a car requires operating two pedals and a wheel. We can even modify them to require less for people who are physically impaired.
Good luck with taking care of an actual horse with a physical impairment. I'm sure you'll just say it's good exercise though, and woe onto you if you're someone with something like limited mobility trying to muck a horse stall.
It's always funny how the people who lived in the most privileged little bubbles seem to think those big city sheeple just don't get it
Taking care of a horse is easy, it's therapeutic even. Besides, if you don't want to own a horse, you can always hitch a ride from a friendly neighborhood horse-carriage operator.
You are not the rugged individualist yeoman you imagine yourself to be.
I don't know how you managed to miss the point I'm making so aggressively.
Are you joking? You're not, but part of me wants to believe you are.
Is this really the USP of horses? Do they even do this?
The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2.
We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our climate, Mud huts are more than enough to protect us from the elements. We have so much land in the US, why can't we all spread out instead of building high rises??
Edit: who's downvoting this? look at the replies below, people know this is a real problem.
https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb37...
A solution for full-scale CCS has now matured that facilitates the further development of CCS in both Norway and Europe. The project has encompassed carbon capture from Norcem’s cement factory in Brevik and carbon capture from Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration facility at Klemetsrud, Oslo. Northern Lights, which is a collaboration between Equinor, Shell and Total, has been responsible for the CO2 transport and storage part of the project. This part of the project comprises ships for transport of liquid CO2, a reception terminal in Øygarden municipality, and pipeline to a well where CO2 will be injected into a storage formation beneath the seabed
edit: formatting
You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!
It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.
Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.
Decomposing poop takes time, and it's pretty awful to be around while it's happening. Also, for something to decompose into the ground, it needs to reach the ground, which it's not going to do if the street is paved.
To be short, saying that Bitcoin has the right of polluting while doing nothing useful in return because there are cars, is wrong.
Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).
Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.
Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better.
Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.
Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are.
Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian.
And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
> Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve,
How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
A deflationary distributed ledger has yet to prove itself as having any kind of real utility in the first place.
Why use BTC instead of an anonymized crypto like Monero?
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
How much would you say you spend on these markets in a month?
But I was asking how much you specifically spend per month in this way.
you just mentioned the utility right there. Is this a trick question?
Maybe you forgot "censorship resistant". I know paypal works for you or something, but not everybody has that luxury you know.
Let's see how easy this game is to play, now I only need to claim that any advantages you bring up are either irrelevant or not unique to PayPal. At least that's how every argument against Bitcoin usually goes.
My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table.
> mass transit is less flexible
frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
> distributed
multi-node database. Done.
> resistant to inflation
Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
Thats uncharitable, and in my opinion ignorant. Inflation distorts the signals people use to make investments, leading to misallocation of assets.
There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could. The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)
Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
Also, hey! we meet again!
And of course, always a pleasure haha.
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
> Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets.
Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
No, not really. Democracy relies on the idea of majority rule. Frameworks for ensuring minority rights aren't trampled on are created but for the most part it is in fact the needs of the many that take precedence. That is mass transit, not individual transit.
> Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
I'm actually short CME Bitcoin futures from 56,000, so I'm paying a lot of attention. Don't wanna end up on the wrong side of that one, it's a spicy meatball!
> Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
This assertion is completely unfounded. Generally folks who have no money spend all of their income on necessities as they receive it. Folks who have money have access to places to park it.
Apparently the many disagree with you, and like their cars.
> This assertion is completely unfounded.
You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
Many people were into CFC refrigerants. Many people are into coal. Many people are into fossil fuels. An idea that enjoys a lot of support isn't automatically a good idea. We need to be prepared to argue ideas on their merits without appealing to the status quo.
> You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
You can keep not citing your sources ;)
Ahem, European reality begs to differ.
Literally anything you buy is 100% inflation resistant. Literally. Anything. Shoes, gum, dryer lint, stocks, real estate, crypto. Once you're not in fiat currency the only thing that matters is ROI, not inflation.
Anything offering you 15% APY for "no risk" is a great way for you to go bankrupt because obviously something hasn't been priced in. If the benchmark interest rate is 0% ask yourself why on earth you're getting 15%. If someone offers you something that seems too good to be true it absolutely is.
DeFi is decentralized 2008.
The site guidelines are available for your reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What you seem to be saying is that the market participants are idiots and are in a state of mania, and that you somehow "know better" than them. This is equally bad, maybe HN rules should add this in too, because the condescension is tiresome.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to "caution" me about the way I write my posts on here and point me to the rules, but I'll have you know that the "fake points" I gained were a (large) order of magnitude greater than the "flagged" posts.
Have a nice day.
Speculative mania doesn’t mean participants are idiots it just means they’re playing musical chairs, and once the music stops whoever’s left without a chair is left with nothing. And yeah some people get swept up through confirmation bias, seeing number go up and convincing themselves there’s something where nothing exists. Those will be the ones most likely left without a chair.
As for “knowing better” I have my theories which I back with evidence.
I’m not into keeping score here just saying net karma of 0 is not the objective per se, I’m pointing out your post was clearly not in the letter or spirit of the site rules, this isn’t Reddit.
It’s been 13 years now and even the most hardcore blockchain enthusiasts have been unable to point to a single measurable concrete thing achieved better with blockchain that a classical solution. Not one and no path in sight. Only number go up and money laundering? 13 years of time from some of the smartest most ambitious and optimistic folks in all of the tech world. And nothing.
This is ill informed and not in the spirit of HN. I don't even want to argue against this because you haven't done the bare minimum in terms of "research", speaking of confirmation bias, have you considered that you may be confirming your own biases by spouting things like "number go up and money laundering"? really? bitcoin is probably the worst way to launder money. You are yet another irrational critic.
Who's "everyone" exactly? My comments are broadly speaking applicable to a US audience as I don't have sufficiently deep first-hand knowledge of other markets. If you don't have money, then you don't have anything to invest and it's not really a problem. If you do have money, you shouldn't have any trouble with services like Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment or Wealthfront.
In lower-income countries, a $20 fee may be as much as 10% of GDP per capita, and therefore totally unsuitable.
Do you challenge that assertion?
> Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry?
This is tracked by the BLS. [1]
> Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
Which is why we need meaningful social policy changes, such as a $15 minimum wage and one that's indexed to inflation. Changing the currency to one that doesn't inflate will simply lead to a flat or reduction year over year in nominal wages. What matters isn't the units, it's how much of what they represent that people get to take home.
You need to make social policy changes, not monetary ones to achieve your goal. Your cause is noble but your target is off.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Lots of workers don't get inflation adjustments to their wages. And even if they do, you'll still lose money because a larger share of your income will go to taxes unless the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation very frequently, which they're not.
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence.
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Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place.
Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions.
To quote Kai Stinchcombe
> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ...
> Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
Air pollution is still a significant harm, even if the space wasting harms also exist.
As for the decentralization aspect: I think a lot of people in countries outside of the US would disagree with you that trust is not a problem with the banking system. Not everyone out there can just get a credit card with 2% cashback that's backed by the rule of law I enjoy in the US.
I think you've also sidestepped the issue of inflation. Just because the American public hasn't yet learned that their money's value is being printed away doesn't mean that they're not going to be the ones feeling the hurt in 5-20 years, particularly if UBI et al don't keep pace with their decrease in purchasing power.
I saw another one of your comments allude to the idea that democracy is a solution to this, but I don't ascribe to the idea that we should shirk technology solutions because political ones might exist. In many cases, technological innovation drives demand for political action. I don't want to debate the merits of Uber as a company, but I think it's hard to ignore the idea that the introduction of car-hailing apps created demand for governments to completely rethink taxi monopolies.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to make a case for Bitcoin. I'm trying to make a case for the idea that the adoption of and furor around Bitcoin is going to significantly influence the vNext of our banking system, even if that just means e.g. that the near-instant clearing of large Bitcoin transactions is showing folks that ACH is garbage, or that T+1 stock settlement is achievable.
The reason monetary policy is inflationary is not because there's a shadowy cabal of evil people who want to make your money worthless. Inflationary monetary policy is necessary to incentivize commerce and investment.
If money increases value at rest, then everybody will just hoard it, which is exactly what happened during every deflationary period of American monetary history: the economy ground to a screeching halt because everybody with money to spare stopped spending.
I feel like the bitcoin speculation bubble has led enthusiasts to forget what currency is supposed to be for. No, the purpose of money is not to be a number on an account sheet that goes up and makes you happy.
Nowadays it's a lot easier to just use a bank-sponsored method, and cryptocurrency transactions have gotten pretty expensive, but there definitely was a use case that made me like cryptocurrency.
Venmo does not make cross-border payments.
Venmo does not allow me to take a loan or to borrow money to anyone that has any kind of collateral.
Venmo can seize my funds.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed risky.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed immoral.
---
Okay, I get that the standard crypto "enthusiast" keeps talking about it like it is going to replace everything and that therefore they will get in to become quadrillionaries.
That's a naive view. Crypto is important even if doesn't replace all of the existing institutions. It is important because it increases optionality. If a centralized system works for you, great. But for some people it doesn't, and these people still need a way to invest, save, make commerce, etc, etc, etc...
That's probably not a good example, considering that electric cars predate gas powered cars. By the start of the 20th century, 40% of the cars in the US were steam powered, 38% electric, and 22% gasoline.
And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.
And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff
Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
With that said, more power to those people that don't want or need one, life is all about what works for the individual.
I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily.
> I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads.
Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake.
I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining.
I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur. The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm.
Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.
And if cars were primarily used as an enthusiast pursuit (like horses in the modern world, actually), this argument would make sense. But cars are not primarily an enthusiast pursuit, instead they are something that we've structured our entire way of life around, and made enormous sacrifices for. Many people need a car whether they want one or not, and we all pay the consequences for it.
Human existence is meaningless and thus anything we do is meaningless. However, that also frees us up to do whatever we want since there is no universal authority telling us how to live our lives. Even in the face of an abusive police state we can still decide to resist.
The problem with Bitcoin is that if one were to maximize human potential then Bitcoin would be a really, really low bar. It's basically a premium currency for an MMO, except the MMO doesn't exist and there is no item shop and even the idea of creating such an item shop (think of NFTs) suffers from problems mentioned in the article. You can simply copy digital assets. Ownership over a digital asset doesn't protect it from being copied.
Why is dense urban development better ? I could cite 100 studies why it’s not better not to mention all the people who hate living in “dense” living conditions
I'm also not certain how much cars are worse for the environment compared to horses. If we had to sustain similar numbers of people without cars we would have tons of horses (I assume horses emit similar amounts of methane to cows, which I know are a major contributor). We'd also have to feed our hundreds of millions or billions of horses. That agricultural effort would probably have a huge environmental cost. We'd have to deal not only with places to park our horses but also somehow manage the immense amount of waste that would come with packing a few million horses into a city and the accompanying health problems with that.
I think cars are a pretty good invention and wouldn't be surprised if, on net, they were better for the environment.
Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.
Unless you mean that the volatility doesn't matter if the asset appreciates so much that the volatility becomes irrelevant, but that's not a property of a store of value, that's a property of a speculative gamble.
So unless you are claiming that cars are a net negative then it's not a good analogy.
> We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil
I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. All they could do is sabotage the BTC system and make it less lucrative for normal public.
I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world to protect the market for oil being denominated in US Dollars (petrodollars).
https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr...
If you do have a salient point to make about the "truth," perhaps you should come out and make it. I'm sure a bunch of us would be happy to hear it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-m...
Think about how the petro-dollar network is secured, how much energy it consumes, arguably more polluting than hydroelectricity (or another non-polluting/renewable source) used to secure a decentralized, permissionless, digital monetary network (it's not just a token, it's also the network and a store). Can you honestly tell me that you see no value in that system? if you do, what amount of energy use is justified, there has to be some number, right?
Compare it with gold, for instance, how much energy is expended in moving a billion dollars of gold from one location to another (based on distance), think about the amount of security it needs while it is being moved and stored, how much energy is expended while mining and smelting it.
Bitcoin seems to be an order of magnitude better than the existing comparable systems, there is a clear ability to choose where that energy can come from (unlike petro-dollars or gold). There's already enough natural pressure to move to renewable/stranded energy sources, a few years from now, almost all bitcoin mining will be from renewables/non-polluting sources and all this noise around bitcoin's energy use will be moot, what will you guys complain about then?
To me personally, the auditability of the network by ANYONE is the best feature, I have a node running at home that watches the network, and I can read the source code.
We tried that, we switched to automobiles.
I think thats a big "citation needed" from me..seems more likely both are on the "effect" side.
> Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead.
How brave..
I feel like when people criticize games, they are often implicitly referring to the latter kind, and in that sense, it‘s often constructive criticism.
Those qualities add value in a way that makes it attractive to buyers even if they expect the price to go down over time.
Would you say eventually everyone who wants dollars will have enough and the demand for new dollars will be zero?
No one needs to use bitcoin. Its demand is chiefly speculation. It has very little use other than a speculative vehicle.
Something may become meaningless over time if the landscape changes to undermine the reasons for existence, but that underscores the point that 'reason for existence' is another way of saying 'it means something'.
Bitcoin's reason for existence was the bank bailouts of 2008. It has found supplemental reason in the current economic climate of quantitative easing. That means everything.
"Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything" is an absurd statement.
You're effectively saying that the global economy is also a scheme. I wouldn't disagree with that, it's just that what you're describing isn't unique to bitcoin.
It's not. It's built on increasing productivity.
We've seen the exact same cycles over and over and yet no one seems to "get it". When the block reward halved from 50 to 25, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. When the block reward halved from 25 to 12.5, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. And after every crash, there was a recovery.
Guess what's gonna happen the block reward halves from 12.5 to 6.25?
Go on... take a wild guess.
Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
I wonder why no one bothers to ask how much power all the payment processors in the world like VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, QuickPay, etc. and so forth use... oh yeah, that's because in their mind they're "legitimate", whatever the fuck that means. This illusion that seems to grasp everyone's mind and never let go utterly boggles me. Its a bunch of made-up bullshit, including Bitcoin, yet for some reason people hang onto it like its a loaf of bread they could eat to stay alive.
All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
This is the wrong assumption to start from. You should think of the opposite assumption. These people fully understand Bitcoin and other stupid investments.
I thought long and hard about all of this and there is nothing to "get".
>Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
Here is the short story. Everything is up. What makes cryptocurrencies special? That they are entirely fictional? So ultimately, since cryptocurrencies aren't used as currencies and instead treated as assets with 0 return like gold the expectation is that it merely catches up with inflation. If it goes up faster than inflation then it is a bubble purely driven by human irrationality. In other words, Bitcoin is a bubble/speculation sentiment index. You can benchmark any other asset against Bitcoin to mostly "cancel" out the speculation part of the market.
>All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
I can believe that the value of 1€ is high enough to buy a house and then get smacked in the face by house construction companies who build houses for 200k€.
Meanwhile with Bitcoin that is fair game since there is no company that accepts 4 Bitcoin to buy a house no matter what the current value of Bitcoin is. There is no economy that is making the price sticky by making people consider what you can actually do with the currency. Since you can barely do anything with Bitcoin its value isn't based on the existence of an economy that exchanges it, it is merely based on random thoughts of random people who want a self fulfilling prophecy aka a bubble.
Prejudice gets amplified because it often seems insightful, and online, barraged by information all day, people click, read these blurbs and one liners, then pass them on.
Prejudice is also emotionally satisfying because typically people believe what is already inline with their beliefs. So taking the time to research and understand topics is not as pleasurable as passing along prejudice.
It’s all around us online, from simple celebrity gossip, to political analysis, on and on.
We’ve somehow as a society got to get our heads around the fact that this form of communication online is brand new to the human experience, and we have to understand it’s impacting us in new ways.
I fear all the ways Prejudice is pushing us apart, and away from fact, understanding, and compassion.
>I fear all the ways Prejudice is pushing us apart, and away from fact, understanding, and compassion.
As said, it's absolutely defying expectations. It's driving people toward fact, understanding and compassion.
What's concerning is its the top comment on this HN thread.
Here we are, a decade later, still sure it's a stupid idea and increasingly frustrated that the public doesn't understand that.
At least reconsider the proof of stake crypto chains. Not an energy waste.
BUT I checked the current gas prices, and it's really not bad. You're looking at $3-4 for 5-10 minutes on a transaction. Too pricey for splitting restaurant bills, but not too bad for sending $100 around
I guess that when you get to $100+ though you have to deal with too much volatility, and there's no good way to hedge against it as a US citizen (at least, I can't find any reputable brokerage/exchange that will let me short small amounts of crypto)
On the other hand, a government-issued cryptocurrency that is entirely under government's control with no anonymity, is not stupid at all. And I think this will be the future of crypto. Not saying it is good, just saying it is inevitable.
If you start off with the stupid explanations of Bitcoin HODLers then it requires a lot of deep thinking to debunk all of it and ultimately reach the same conclusion as those snarky people.
In a way, what has been happening lately, is the democratization of the power to game the system. Which doesn’t mean that now anyone can do it, but rather that it is not limited only to the rich and powerful anymore (until they figure out a way to gate-keep it again).
Your description is correct, but it's far from the full picture.
Part of BTC's value is probably the hope (speculation) that it will one day be used as an alternative payment system / store of value / whatever, and that will cause it to maintain value. As of right now, a share of AMZN itself does virtually nothing either. Its value lies in the hope (speculation) that one day Amazon will pay us money for holding it.
An AMZN share on the other hand represents some small percentage of actual labor and production being done by Amazon's employees.
Which is nice on paper but is functionally worthless for virtually all shareholders unless AMZN pays a dividend, no? The only way to generate wealth from AMZN right now is to give it to someone else for more money than you paid for it. If you bought AMZN 20 years ago for retirement, you'd still be waiting for that asset to produce anything on its own. For fun, compare that to the East India companies which paid up to double digit dividends from year one.
To be fair, AMZN is one of the more promising examples of these tech growth stocks, but many of them seem to be trading in a way similar to BTC: pure speculation on an asset which currently does not produce anything on its own -- and has no guarantee that it ever will.
Of course when an investor buys single stocks he is taking on the risk that the company has to survive until it pays out dividends or does stock buybacks. However, literally everyone knows and understands that risk. Everyone has heard about companies going bankrupt. This is why you are supposed to have a portfolio of a variety of stocks. Employees who receive stock compensation want to avoid the risk that their employer will disappear and they lose their job and the stocks both at the same time.
But if we assume that Amazon is not paying out dividends right now because it is still growing (I don't know, haven't checked since I consider Amazon to be an awful company) then it would grow its ability to pay out dividends in the future. There will be one day in the future that Amazon will stop growing and then be forced to just pay out the profits. If it turns out that the margins at the end are super thin and it can't pay enough dividends to justify its market cap then the value of the stock will simply go down because investors sell their stock and look for companies with growth potential. This will happen until the value of the stock is low enough that the valuation of the company is entirely based on dividends.
>pure speculation on an asset which currently does not produce anything on its own -- and has no guarantee that it ever will.
This is an undesirable property of the stock market, at least if you were to ask the central bank or government or me. With Bitcoin, this is actually considered desirable because there is nothing to it other than speculation.
People insist on chaos with Bitcoin. It's the only way you can make money off of it.
Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fund innovation and progress. Several people I know funded their own startups.
Of course the crypto market attracts tons of scum and shady people too. And the hype can be damaging (older generation buying in at all-time-highs, and panic selling, causing high variance).
Early adopters were far from the huddled masses. Can't really blame them for others jumping on the hype train, just like you can't judge someone holding gold, by all the criminals holding gold or states going to war over it. Forget energy usage for a second, and wonder, "how many people actually die yearly to keep the dollar valuation high?" I feel the "resource waste" is more a feature, than a bug. If you need the electricity of entire countries to attack the network, the network becomes more robust.
And then let the new rich generation use their profits on creating more green or nuclear energy, then keep on mining and holding. Tesla could perhaps help here. Industries where energy is a large part of the budget have the right economic incentives to make renewable energy more cost-effective. Older economies, industries, and hegemonies are married to oil, in aggregate pollute far more, and lack the right incentives.
Poker is a game of skill which will serve you well if trading. Don't judge the game by the drunk pot-splashing tourists, or the risk-averse spectators in the stands, or the regulators looking for a ban after being lobbied by the older generation.
Edit: I stopped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! I got into Bitcoin and ETH early due to an enthusiastic post on HN. Please think back a few years, has your viewpoint changed? Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?
Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong.
Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind.
It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community.
> Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?
These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
Sad, really sad.
Are you serious? This isn't a topic that is about being "right or wrong". You can massively criticize Bitcoin and still invest in it, precisely because you understand the risk and are fully aware of its mechanisms and how it relates to other assets. The price doesn't prove anything since its completely arbitrary.
>Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind.
Sorry, but what hubris? If anything, an increased understanding allows you to be aware of the risks and thus correctly choose your bet size.
>It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community.
I'm not poor because I worked hard to obtain assets that directly benefit me every month. Meanwhile that expectation doesn't even exist for Bitcoin. It's a pure gamble. The fact that some people got rich is meaningless because that happens with gambling and lotteries as well.
>These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
Is this supposed to be a joke? FANG employees with 6 digit salaries who are earning more than enough to afford stocks? I said I am not poor but that doesn't change that there is still a huge gap between me and someone who earns $200k per year at that salary the effort and risk needed to increase your wealth is so low that any dead horse can become financially independent.
>Sad, really sad.
The real sadness is that people think that Bitcoin is the solution to economic problems. Instead of building a working economy that helps everyone we get a second generation of people with legacy wealth. A new generation to hate because they got the spoils early. How long until there is a third generation? A fourth? Because you are going to need a lot of these if you want everyone to benefit.
I am
> You can massively criticize Bitcoin and still invest in it, precisely because you understand the risk
But that degree of complex thought seems impossible to most geeks: for them, things are either good or bad. It's a very black and white thinking.
> Sorry, but what hubris?
The belief that my opinions about a technology are better than the market evaluation of said technology is just hubris. Clearly, you don't have it, given what you said above. You and me are lucky. Not everybody is.
By talent or by luck, you can be more often right that wrong, or the opposite called "harbinger of doom" in marketting [the ipod "lamer than a nomad" on Slashdot and BTC "no future" on HN makes me think nerds are such harbinger of doom!]
However, it's not 100% of the time. You must keep in mind the possibility you may be wrong. You do. I do. Most people don't. They succumb to magical thinking. It keeps them poor.
> The fact that some people got rich is meaningless because that happens with gambling and lotteries as well
The fact is was predicted, and there are more future testable predictions (flow-to-cash) invalidate this point. It's more like buying tickets to lotteries where, due to the jackpot value, the EV is positive. It then makes sense to buy as many tickets as you can, inducing friends and family to the scheme. Some people became quite rich that way. Of course, it entails risk, as nothing is guaranteed. So you should just invest what you can afford to lose.
> > These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
> Is this supposed to be a joke? FANG employees with 6 digit salaries who are earning more than enough to afford stocks?
It's not a joke. Try to understand the difference between people working in FANGs and me: they yearly pay is funny money to me, something I did spend before just for the lol of watching a market crash after having too many drinks.
> I said I am not poor but that doesn't change that there is still a huge gap between me and someone who earns $200k per year at that salary
You feel the huge gap between you and them? I feel it too, except in the opposite direction. And even with our slight differences in opinions, I believe we agree more than you think.
> the effort and risk needed to increase your wealth is so low that any dead horse can become financially independent
Exactly this!!
They have to work hard. I don't, money works for me. I'm sufficiently diversified that, barring a WW3 style event, I will not have to care about money ever.
Hell, I don't even care if crypto will keep booming, as I'm out. I give a hand to a few projects here and there, but that's it.
Now I'm studying biology because it's fun and I have time to occupy. Some people worry about a postdoc after their studies, or finding a job? It's like they are from a different world: if I want, after I'm done studying, I will start a lab and hire people to work on stuff I find interesting - and just with funny money I would blow anyway. No need of VC or anything.
This is the difference between sellings ads at a FANG and being really innovative: taking control of the narrative and the destiny. Making changes in the world.
And it is extremely sad to find myself in that position, after having seen many people I believe more deserving than me stuck in jobs. I tried to tell them. They didn't listen. They didn't use their rationality. They let their fear of high variance in price discourage them from even trying to edge their bets.
> The real sadness is that people think that Bitcoin is the solution to economic problems.
The sadness is that it's available for anyone to benefit, yet most people won't - because they don't understand what a profound change of system it entails, and how deep the changes will be. They don't update their beliefs.
Everybody lucky to be alive today can buy just $1,000 of BTC, and be assured to have enough money get a very nice car in a few years. It's not much (sorry, you had to be an early adopter) but in the US, that's still enough to lift someone to middle class, as a working car increase work opportunities.
Someone at a FANG making 200 times that amount per year could certainly save more, say 20k, and get a (inflation adjusted, so present value) cool half million by 2024 - enough to never have to worry about almost anything, and maybe enough to retire in some parts of the country.
But they won't. They are too busy spitting on crypto. If you have time, read this comment: https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c... and the original post for lol (the author tries to rationalize his decision of refusing 6 bitcoins, saying he would have sold early)
The comment by Z stands out in the magnitude of ignorance and stupidity of other commenters who read as people from another generation not understanding - not even understanding the fact that they don't understand.
Like I did, this person realized their mistake. Now they did some mental math, came with a price model (slightly higher than the $1M I estimate per BTC, but still reasonable if the network effects open new markets for BTC as a store of value compared to the gold market), and will wait until they have enough money to change their life.
$5M isn't that much, but it has the potential to change that person life according to their own calculation.
And that's the beauty of it: there is still enough gain on table to change the life of everybody alive right now - at least of anyone who does understand the change currently happening!
> Because you are going to need a lot of these if you want everyone to benefit.
Unlike you, I'm not worried about the future generations. They will invent great things standing on our shoulders.
A new world economy based on a BTC deflationary base will also provide them a much better environment, as governments will be constrained by reason and reality again.
I think it's because of the massive economic inequality that people experience today. Working an unskilled, or even a skilled job doesn't go as far today as it has in the past. Many people have internalized that they will never be as "successful" or as rich as their elders. Given that situation, it's easy to see why these risky asymmetrical bets are attractive. A failed investment pushes you deeper into poverty, but doesn't fundamentally change your situation. A successful one has the potential to change your life and break the cycle of poverty for you.
For someone who's about to declare bankruptcy, a lottery ticket is an excellent deal. For the lower class of America, so are these investments.
I just wish it didn't have to be this way.
I'm also skeptical of bitcoin, but it can't be dismissed so easily anymore. There's clearly something to it, but what? Is it it just speculation about future value, a hedge against inflation and government control? A way around laws and currency export controls?
I'm not sure.
The bitcoin community has innovated all sorts of social tools for advocating causes and pumping assets. Could $TSLA have reached $850 post-split without these techniques? Maybe. Could $GME have reached around $350 without an army of "diamond hands" and "to the moon" (read: crypto memes)? Definitely not.
This may feel like a stupid point, but I mean it. Goldbugs have been a thing for forever, but the sort of digital advocacy that bitcoin sees puts them to shame by comparison. Not only is there a hoard of crypto fanatics ready to tell you why sitting out of bitcoin is the worst decision you've been making your entire life, but you can even get several entirely disjoint explanations for why bitcoin is something you should invest in (some at a glance: it's going to make digital payments easy, it's a scarce asset like gold and will only increase in price, it will replace fiat as a global currency, it's a revolutionary technology and nothing else like it has been seen before, etc). Similarly, if you try to critique any one of these, another supporter will instantly take up the fight by moving the goalposts to their preferred explanation on why bitcoin is great. (Oh sure it can't do many transactions, but it's not actually for payments it's digital gold...)
This isn't meant to be derogatory against bitcoin supporters, but rather an expression of wonder. It's clearly not a fluke: bitcoin drops off the radar for most people and comes back every couple of years, clearly whatever the supporters and investors are doing to advocate for it is working.
Goldrush FOMO is a very powerful force. Not saying this applies to you, but I think some people can’t stand the cognitive dissonance of being a hacker and not getting into bitcoin, missing out on life-changing money. To deal with it, they need to vilify bitcoin often on quasi-moral grounds.
You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money.
I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc.
There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on.
I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them.
But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.
The problem is thousands of years old. At some point you have enumerated all possible criticism.
Definitively, I don't have enough money to execute all the possible investment strategies I want to follow up on.
It's also weird that the bet size is being ignored. With Bitcoin your maximum bet size is much smaller than with stocks because of the high risk. I can put more money into stocks because they are less risky and thus I can actually end up being exposed to greater gains.
As the other comment pointed out, for FOMO to be this "powerful force" everyone would be constantly enraged they didn't buy Tesla shares 10 years ago, or save that collection toys from their childhood that suddenly became valuable, or any number of other things.
FOMO is only a problem if you struggle with envy.
I did say powerful, not ubiquitous.
Some corrections:
- 10 minutes per block, not per bitcoin (block reward is currently 6.25 bitcoin)
- it’s more like 14 GW, not 72 TW
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?
I agree with your post overall, but I think you'd be foolish to think that it wasn't always this way. The only difference is another strata of folk now can play as well.
Ignorant people like to call it Dutch Tulips. Was Dutch Tulips a one-tie event? Or did it continue to increase in value and usage with higher highs and higher lows every couple years?
By your "waste of resources" take, which is again so tired - at least Bitcoin is helping Venezuelans and Nigerians and others who have purchased it, unlike video games, which waste FAR more electricity and are a larger waste of resources.
https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c...
> "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)"
The fact this clever whoring works on HN, saying you'll be downvoted then saying something mainstream popular to get upvoted says a lot about the HN community.
Absolutely 100% off topic to the article and painting the garden shed.
Good work to OP turning their claimed karma level from 11 to 177, that's hacking.
'In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.'
Not trying to be elitist but if you find this topic new then you probably also find Bitcoin's technical workings new. Since it's now more than a decade old I don't find this a very topical inclusion for a 'news' site.
I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible.
Even if there's no grand takeaway.
I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable.
Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.
These are all things I hadn't considered before reading this article, and I found them enjoyable to think about. If you didn't get anything out of it, that's fine, but don't rain on others' parade.
You can increase that time as much as you need
The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.
In comparison to what?
What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?
It is such a weird sentiment to me because it would never occur to me to devalue the value others get out of things I don't understand. I hate bonds, I don't "get" why anyone would want to buy bonds, people have tried to explain it to me. I decided that I will never buy a bond in my life because they are just the dumbest form of investment. I can hold that sentiment whilst saying "I don't get why they buy them but clearly there is a lot of value from the vehicle and it is clearly a valid form". I don't see why I should need to understand an monetary vehicle or like an investment vehicle to understand that some people do, and those people have a valid opinion.
Well, where are we now? What significant advancements have occurred since 2013 as a result of Bitcoin (other than the catastrophic climate impact)? What new technologies are powered by crypto other than niche, nerdy shit which no-one outside of a handful of enthusiasts cares about? Bitcoin is now 12 years old - if Bitcoin is the next World Wide Web, then who is the Google of crypto? Who is the Amazon? Hell, does Bitcoin even have a Lycos or a Yahoo?
And yes, I acknowledge that millions of people own Bitcoin and are trading it. But what reason is there to believe in Bitcoin, other than the fact that other people believe it? Yes, I know that you could say the same of fiat currency: dollars only have value because we believe they do. But the difference is that I use fiat currency every day to accomplish real things that have an enormous material impact on my life. The only thing I’ve ever used Bitcoin for is to buy drugs - what else am I ever going to do with it, except hope that the value increases so I can sell it to another speculator?
Maybe the crypto enthusiasts are laughing at me for asking these rhetorical questions as if there isn’t an obvious answer - in which case, let me know! I don’t want to miss out on the crypto wave if it really is as big as people keep telling me. But I’ve read books about Bitcoin, delved into crypto-related code, and spent many hours of my life studying blockchain technology and trying to understand what all the fuss is about. That was a couple of years ago, and I got bored and gave up. I’ve been telling myself to take another look given the recent price surge, but I just can’t motivate myself. What am I missing? Why do people act as if this is all so obvious?
For any task (beyond speculation and illegal activities) that bitcoin is used for, there exists other, usually much better services that can be used instead.
The claimed benefits of BTC are (1) to remove government control of money, and (2) to eliminate the need for trust, but (1) ignores why we have chosen to give governments control of money in the first place when gold still exists (and can be traded electronically), while (2) requires you to ignore the other half of the transaction where you buy something with the money rather than just putting it in someone else’s account — reports of being ripped off by a vendor goes back to Akkadian cuneiform, and things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this, putting rules on what was once anonymous shiny rock that anyone could mine in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.
Third party escrow services, the better business bureau, the police... all of these can (and should in many cases) exist with bitcoin. It doesn't have to be either/or.
It’s a catch-22: to be useful, it can’t be useful.
also the military/police/law/government defend you from being killed for your bitcoin.
That's an understatement. There are two restaurants within 100 miles of my home that accept BTC, let alone use LN.
If LN ever sees anything more than toy usage, it will fall over instantly, and become unusable.
1. The gold mining industry has nothing to do with bitcoin.
2. The gold mining industry has nothing to do with money.
3. The gold mining industry does not use anywhere near 0.1% of the entire energy production of the planet.
4. Just throwing the army in there for some reason, huh.
5. The lightning network does not "process an unlimited number of transactions".
6. The Lightning network does not scale.
7. Nobody knows how to make the Lightning network scale.
8. If the Lightning network worked, which it doesn't, it doesn't need to run on top of Bitcoin, so Bitcoin still does not need to burn 0.1% of the world's energy.
Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.
"""and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic."""
Only the US is incentivized to have USD be the world's reserve currency. Meanwhile, 7 BB people around the world prefer a denationalized reserve currency, countries will prefer to interact with each other with a less trackable currency (e.g. Iran and the current sanctions), and based on the usage of tax loopholes by every multi-national company (e.g. FB, Apple, Google) every business will prefer transacting in less trackable currency (especially with crypto-coin tumblers). This demand for a denationalized reserve currency will be supplied by some crypto-coin (maybe BTC, maybe something else). FWIW, I don't think having a "less trackable currency" is a "good thing", I'm just saying there are large organizations that benefit from it financially and therefore it will exist.
Frankly once the S&P companies purchase enough BTC (e.g. TSLA, Square, etc), a BTC 51% attack will need to be defended against by the US military to ensure national stability. If BTC (or any crypto-coin) can hit "too big to fail" in the US, the rest of the world's militaries will all build a defense strategy around BTC mining. As as consequence, cheaper energy will also be an investment into national security.
There are still more problems with BTC specifically, like "slow transactions" but as may here have said, we can either use a geographically sharded blockchain (e.g. BTC-California, BTC-USD, BTC-CAD, BTC-RUP), where each shard allows fast transactions, and slow reconciliation, or we will just leverage credit for fast transactions like we do today, with slow reconciliation between banks like we have today. I don't see "centralization" as a problem, because having bank accounts and credit are very useful as an individual (as individuals will likely only transact with credit cards like we do today).
Will BTC become "too big to fail" in the US? Unclear. Another crypto might get there first. However, there is no scenario where the world's reserve currency continues to be tied to a single nation.
The US is merely the largest reserve currency and has been trying to reduce that role for well over a decade now - being a reserve currency merely means foreign crises lead to dollar flight which has knock-on effects on US trade. There's no real upside - demand for dollars is based on the stabiliy and size of the US economy, nothing more. EUR, JPY and GBP also operate as reserve currencies due to the strengths of their economies.
https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/the-reserve-currency-myth-t...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2016/01/07/the-d...
What need there is for an international reserve currency is filled by the IMF's SDR, an asset whose value is based on basket of USD, EUR, RMB, GBP and JPY:
https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14...
If that is the case, then BTC certainly isn't going to end the US military.
Increasingly, mining operations have to make special arrangements with entire power grids to suck up their energy and basically just burn it in arbitrary calculation. The scale at which this operates, and the increase over time, are both what makes up a lot of the problem, and what makes it impossible to hide.
If you'd prefer a world where people value bitcoin BECAUSE due to its unpopularity and externalities, governments resort to drone striking such operations when discovered, all I can say is: well, that solves the energy wastage issue, as blown-up ASIC farms aren't good at burning energy anymore. Maybe it solves the constant devaluation against energy cost issue, too! But I think you're missing the point and looking at only the end product of the industry.
In order for this scenario to become a reality, many governments would have to collaborate to make mining infeasible. But they would be incentivized to not collaborate so they can instead tax their miners and get the profits for themselves.
If you’ll excuse my admittedly also-naïve wargaming of their responses:
“Dear ISPs, this is the government. That stuff you do to block piracy and illegal porn? Do that for bitcoin.”
“Dear Banks, this is the government. Purchase of bitcoin is now a federal offence. Tell us if anyone tries to exchange them for money.”
“Dear The Power Company, this is a government order. Turn off power to these properties who are engaged in illegal Bitcoin mining.”
“Dear everyone, this is the government. Your taxes can only be paid in dollars, not in bitcoin.”
(Not that I would say such things will never happen, only that I expect America to become irrelevant on the world stage before it happens; and even in the most extreme USSR-mimicking scenario that is not something I expect before 2041).
Another scenario is if it grows slowly amongst the countries that have unstable currencies. Slowly it takes over the USD as the world currency. At a certain point, the US would have to allow it to participate in that economy.
Such nations collectively switching to a different currency like the Euro or the Yuan is way more plausible than switching to Bitcoin; and not only do none of the USA, the Eurozone, nor China have economic policies compatible with giving up direct control of inflation, the usefulness of a shared single currency isn’t enough to outweigh the political costs for the UK to use the Euro (famously), or South Korea to use the Yuan, or Canada to use USD.
Money in the scale of governments isn’t like money on the scale of individuals. For governments, money isn’t even like it is for the richest individuals, different as it is between the rich and normal people.
And why wouldn't a government whose citizens do not trust the government's currency, not incentivize its citizens to use a denationalized currency instead of funding potential threats?
e.g. The Venezuelan government would way rather its citizens use BTC over USD or Colombian currency, in order to ensure inflation/deflation is globally decided by neutral parties, rather than decided by a single foreign entity with potentially malicious intent.
> The Venezuelan government would way rather its citizens use BTC over USD or Colombian currency, in order to ensure inflation/deflation is globally decided by neutral parties
Why would those parties have Venezuelan interests in mind rather than their own? One of the arguments against the Eurozone (I’m not qualified to judge it on quality, but it is given as an argument) is that Northern Europe “should” have different inflation to Southern Europe to help boost the local economies. Can’t do that with a single currency, they say, and that would apply more the wider that zone spreads. A single global economy — fiat, digital, or metallurgical — would never be able to resolve it.
Yup! I agree, there will be many holdout countries. However, even the UK uses the USD as the world's reserve currency.
> Why would those parties have Venezuelan interests in mind rather than their own?
Venezuela was fucked because a handful of people are performing bad monetary policy. While the interests of each mining operation would be their own interests, in aggregate, the interests of all BTC mining is a globally averaged monetary policy. Unaffected by corruption, or stupidity (whichever you think is a more apt description of Venezuela's current monetary problem).
And what in the standard deviations of all nation’s needs?
I don't know what a globally averaged monetary policy will look like (or who it'll benefit the most), but I can say that for any population currently living with a monetary policy below the average (i.e. because of corruption or stupidity), it'll be an improvement and they will adopt a denationalized currency to get it.
No, the Venezuelan government has tried to create its own cryptocurrency called the Petro in order to have control of it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cryptocurrency-venezuela-...
Legitimizing crypto currencies by creating one, without increasing trust in the government just results in more of the Venezuelan people buying a denationalized crypto.
> It’s possible that, as Jiménez suggested, Venezuela’s peer-to-peer bitcoin activity wouldn’t be where it is today without crypto-friendly initiatives from the government itself. It’s also possible that bitcoin adoption in Venezuela may be driven by the sheer rate of Venezuela’s hyperinflation, which outpaces other crisis economies. [0]
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research
Physical force is the strongest currency on Earth. Arguing it’s not is arguing millions of people die for entertainment rather than shifts of power.
If Bitcoin is the revolutionary future millions will die on that hill to make it so.
Now let's say in a few years, that inflection point happens where crypto sees an exponential rate of adoption. Every other country begins to use it, some ban it, many others adopt it. At that point, if not using crypto will put the US at a disadvantage, they have no other choice but to adopt it as well.
A semi-related example is the way many companies "disrupt" the markets e.g. Uber/Airbnb wasn't a threat to many cities, until it was. At which point, the demand for Uber/Airbnb outweighed the government's ability to do anything about it.
It's not the best example since some cities have done things about it and Uber/Airbnb, being a company, is easier to target.
With crypto, its decentralized nature makes it much more difficult to control and attempting to ban it will raise issues around free speech.
That's not to say countries won't try and succeed in getting it banned, though in the case of the US, I don't think it's as cut and dry.
You’re saying all militarized countries on Earth will come to a point where Bitcoin is prominent and they will forfeit their power over their citizens without any fight?
You’re proposing Bitcoin will bring world peace without conflict?
Also, I don't think I agree with the notion that adopting crypto would result in a country forfeiting their power over the citizens. There are plenty of ways to integrate crypto into existing governments while still maintaining control.
I'm not claiming this will happen, more of contemplating on how a global decentralized currency can take over.
As far as bringing world peace, I don't think a decentralized currency would do any such thing. It's probably one of the required steps towards it, but one of many.
Meanwhile, the USA could try to preempt this future, but only the USA is incentivized to have USD be the world's reserve currency. As such the USA would need to threaten every other country in the world to stop using BTC, but its not clear if that causes BTC adoption to drop, or the Streisand Effect to kick in.
And ofcourse, "mutually assured destruction" stops any large country from employing too large a threat against any other large country.
If we are talking about a coordinated aggressive action to cripple the economy of a superpower nation, you're basically triggering "mutually assured destruction". As such its most productive to assume that doesn't occur.
Why anyone out themselves in harm’s way like that?
Risk isn't inherently a deterrent. If the reward is perceived to be high enough, there will be a first adopter.
At this point Bitcoin and Eth have about a trillion USD of built up burned work. Is that enough to prime the pump for a POS-based world economy? I dunno. Probably?
Remember; the last time Bitcoin tried to change its mining algorithm, the democracy voted for a split. Ethereum has said they're moving from Proof of Work to Stake; I'm not surprised, given the Ethereum developers seem to abhor Work in all of its forms, including making progress on Ethereum itself, so we'll see if that actually happens in a few decades.
PoS is a theory right now, with some minor market traction, but nothing to the degree of BTC or ETH. Don't levy it as a promise which absolves the environmental sins of cryptocurrency, when its so obviously unlikely to do so. Bitcoin is the zeitgeist; its actively destroying the planet; its not moving to PoS.
They still have to migrate the rest of the network to it, but that's a relatively easy task. Once you have consensus, adding more data to reach consensus on is basically just adding a hash value to each block.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks Bitcoin will replace militaries completely.
May Satoshi save us all.
The importance of the role of the dollar as a reserve currency is also just an urban myth:
https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/the-reserve-currency-myth-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling#Petrodol...
Most lay-persons don't understand it as a tax and therefore do not complain about it until they cannot afford things (housing, food, etc), and at which point the government distracts by bundling (hiding?) the inflation problem with the stagnant wage / income equality problem.
Eventually (every 2 decades) minimum wage in increased to catch up to inflation. Basically the inflationary tax strategy results in the US budget getting 2 decades of "extra taxes" (burdened by the lower middle class and the working classes[1]), then a reset, and then repeat.
[1] Note inflation as a tax strategy is actually a negative tax on low-interest debt holders like businesses, and home owners. It is also has a net-neutral effect on the investing class, because assets inflate proportionally. Meanwhile, credit card debt and other high-interest loans are not reduced as much (i.e. X% inflation of 19% credit card interest is a lot lower than, X% inflation of 2.5% mortgage interest).
> Say the US government issues a bond, some bank buys it, and eventually they sell it to the Federal Reserve. The US government has the same debt, and it seems to me that the only thing that has changed is that the bank now has cash where before it had a bond.
This is mischaracterizing the situation. It actually is: 1. A bank buys a newly issued bond; 2. The government spends that bond money on the private sector. 3. The Fed buys the bond by changing the values in its database (i.e. "printing money").
The best I can do to explain MMT is this:
1. The government spends as much as it wants and collects as much debt as it wants.
2. The government plays a game of chicken with the private sector (including other countries).
2.1. As long as everyone plays along, its a ponzi scheme that spirals upwards until it hits a ceiling (hyper inflation).
3. Meanwhile, until it hits the ceiling, it creates "manageable inflation" and/or deflates the rest of the world's assets.
3.1. As long as the rest of the world plays along (which it does), the extra cash funds innovation (i.e. the private sector) and improves quality of life world wide (i.e. better pharmaceuticals, cheaper computing, etc).
3.2. Meanwhile, in the US the "manageable inflation" is paid for by the poorest.
My personal thought: the world's interconnected market is so complex, that no one understands cause and effect (including the people making the rules). Currently, there is an emergent property of that complexity that the US, Japan, etc can "print infinite money" and some large group of people somewhere are left holding the bag worse-off for the US' decision, but no one really knows who this group is nor how much those people got fucked. Even the impacted individuals don't realize they are impacted because individually its a small impact, and innovation keeps improving their lives enough to not complain.
Hopefully a denationalized crypto (i.e. no ability for a single nation to print money) will help us simplify all of this to be understandable again.
From what I can read, no one knows how it works, people just know that it works.
Without a simpler design how can I know I’m not being harmed? I think this is one question that will help drive people to adopt a denationalized currency.
FWIW, I do not own any BTC or other crypto coins.
P.S. I highly recommend you research MMT. I think you'll find that no-one (including the most experienced economists) understands the details of how the emergent property works, they only understand that it works.
Because over the last decade the US has been quietly transitioning to the MMT mental model. MMT is how we got out of the 2008 recession and also how we are funding both the pandemic stimulus packages (in 2020 and again in 2021).
The inflation we previously discussed in this thread is, in my understanding, a direct consequence of MMT.
> "Congress has been showing us — in practice if not in its rhetoric – exactly how M.M.T. works: It committed trillions of dollars this spring that in the conventional economic sense it did not ‘have.’ It didn’t raise taxes or borrow from China to come up with dollars to support our ailing economy. Instead, lawmakers simply voted to pass spending bills, which effectively ordered up trillions of dollars from the government’s bank, the Federal Reserve. In reality, that’s how all government spending is paid for." [0]
> When President Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act into law, the federal government sold bonds to fund the new spending, expanding the government debt. However, the largest purchaser of those bonds was the Fed. ... As a currency issuer, the federal government can create more money to buy Treasuries and pay off its debts, making an involuntary default impossible. Under the Fed’s jurisdiction, it could purchase all U.S. Treasuries tomorrow and retire the entire U.S. federal debt, something Japan has already done with nearly half of its debt. ... Is the Fed’s financing of the debt created by the CARES Act fueling inflation? Not quite. The annual U.S. inflation rate currently stands at around one percent, half of the Fed’s two percent target. In fact, over the past decade, the Fed has struggled to increase the U.S. inflation rate. There actually is not enough spending (aggregate demand) in the U.S. economy to hit the Fed’s inflation goal. [2]
> Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is alive and well in the United States. While MMT is derided by mainstream economists, the federal government is practicing MMT. From running massive federal government deficits, to the operations of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) by the Federal Reserve Bank, the United States is practicing a policy of MMT that is currently underpinning the economy of the United States. ... The U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) began its own form of quantitative easing (QE1) on November 25, 2008 by purchasing $600 billion in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and agency debt. [3]
> While MMT may seem like a purely theoretical construct, it should be recognized that many governments, including the U.S. government, are effectively already putting MMT into practice. [4]
If you're still not convinced that the US is actively applying MMT in practice thats ok, lets wait and find out more. Meanwhile, thanks for catalyzing my motivation to research all of this! :)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/us-deficit-corona...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/op-ed-pandemic-moves-modern-...
[2] https://policy-perspectives.org/2020/10/23/modern-monetary-t...
[3] https://intpolicydigest.org/the-u-s-has-embraced-modern-mone...
[4] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/america-is-on-the-road-to-mmt-58...
However, the continued liberal application of QE 1. Could hit a hyper inflation ceiling (hurting the poorest). 2. Weakens USD compared to other currencies (as we have seen through 2020. Hurting every entity that holds cash i.e. typically the poorest). 3. Reduces the ability for the US to apply QE in the future. Hurting our ability to tackle the next crisis, which will predominantly hurt the poorest.
All of this to say, a portion of the lost trust in the USD is being put into crypto to hedge for the medium term, and (for better or worse) to create a long term denationalized currency where no handful of politicians can choose to use QE rather than making good fiscal policy decisions quickly.
I'm not making a judgement about its merits, it might end up horrible.
All I'm saying is, there is a trend towards denationalized currency as a hedge against bad monetary policy. Based on this trend something like BTC will likely become the new gold standard used for slow transactions (i.e. reconciliation) between governments and large corporations.
Will it be BTC? I don't know. Will it be a good thing? I don't know.
I do know, the trend suggests a particular future, and trying to root out the motivations suggest the trend will continue.
But, if you are willing to acknowledge both Square and Tesla are run by very intelligent people, these are quotes about their motivations:
> However, when fiat currency has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere. [0]
> Square believes that cryptocurrency ... provides a way for the world to participate in a global monetary system, which aligns with the company’s purpose. [1]
Based on my research into the motivations for BTC (or any crypto), these quotes are not unique. The majority of the root motivations seem to be 1. "to hedge against bad monetary policy" and 2. "to create a global monetary system" i.e. create a single global monetary policy.
Meanwhile, if enough S&P companies follow Square and Tesla the US government will find BTC is "too big to fail" and adopt it wholly. But I'm not convinced other S&P companies will follow. Lets see.
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1362600676174557186
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/08/square-buys-50-million-in-bi...
> Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military?
People are willing to pay a high energy cost for safety. Bitcoin doesn’t provide me any safety and it doesn’t have the strongest military in the world claiming it’s worth anything.
If you think Bitcoin will topple governments be prepared for a long future of conflict and casualties. Maybe it will be worth it but I doubt it.
So all in all it’s a massive energy waste thought experiment.
What makes you think the US wouldn’t put it’s population in front of the rest of the world in a life or death war scenario?
For instance, I have no problem paying taxes for social services. I have a major ethical problem with my tax dollars being used to fund military action. Bitcoin is not the only piece of the crypto puzzle but if I could keep my assets out of the hands of the US government, I would do it for purely ethical reasons.
What you’re proposing is that Bitcoin needs a massive shift in thought that overthrows all forms of militarized government. Possible? Maybe but highly unlikely without millions of people dying.
The new Bitcoin power would also need its own military to do this. So we’re back at square one or where we are today.
That is unless you think Bitcoin is also the answer to world peace which seems even more far fetched.
Who controls the power grid, the land, the roads, the infrastructure? How is that power enforced? Physical force.
No one gives away power without a fight. If Bitcoin is the future people will need to die to make it so.
The way the government forces you to make good on your tax obligations is wage garnishment: they tell your employer not to pay you but pay the government instead because you're in arrears. In general, I think you overestimate the willingness of third parties to become criminals for your sake.
What if the moon were made of cheese?
I don't see any connection between the growth of BTC and the shrinking of military budgets or the reduction of warfare.
In analogy, it is same reasons why we lock our doors and don't leave keys in parked car.
Do you seriously assume that some nations and some organization, do not, actively seek, how to take things that do not belong to them ?
It's not.
Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored.
Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up just to explain us his grand new theory about money. It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented.
That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.
Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.
To be a money it somehow has to. What is the value of a dollar ? The set of goods you can buy with a dollar. As long as the value of a bitcoin is expressed in another currency that is weird to call it a money.
You are referring to unit of account.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/bitcoin-as-a-store-of-...
I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money.
Are those things that can change over time? Certainly - but it hasn't happened yet.
Transaction cost is pretty low in multiple views:
- You can globally settle billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for less than 10$ [0]
- FIAT Settlements between banks is a complicated and non-auditable process, which is internationally speaking also very slow
- You can build layers on top of bitcoin, i.e. the Lightning Network or liquid, which reduces transaction costs and time by a lot (sub cent range in the lightning network)
Energy usage is not tied to transaction throughput. It is vital to be very high in the future, as it secures this global and auditable settlement network. Mining is a very competitive business. Renewable and unused energy IS the cheapest energy available (without govt. subsidies), thus the most competitive miners will use them. Mining also "subsidizes" research in cheap energy, as it gives you a competitive advantage.
[0] https://twitter.com/CoreFeeHelper/status/1366787351985287168
(1) Most people don't settle on large volumes (thats typically banks/states/institutionals) so small volumes have a high cost percentage making it not a good daily driver. The fact that there is any transaction cost makes it challenging to work with as a daily money vehicle for consumers.
(2) It requires energy to exist and keep a ledger, it also requires energy to mine. Your comment on renewable energy isn't accurate sadly and unused energy works only if you can get access to it which isn't universally available. In some jurisdictions renewable energy beats on price but this is largely on huge projects that are bid into utility grids (At least in North America). It will get there but still needs more time.
I don't see how mining subsidizes research in cheap energy.
Understand they have been debated ad nasueum and the reason is that they haven't really passed muster for the use case we are talking about.
Don't equate my arguments as saying bitcoin is bad - it doesn't have a good universal use case for money and it does have negative environmental benefits associated with it.
(2) It requires real world resources to be spend and uses the most globally available resource, energy. I see it as a feature not a bug.
Renewable energy is the cheapest though[0] and thus the one that competitive miners need to use. Non-competitive miners get driven out very fast thanks to the difficulty adjustment.
Any percentage of optimization you can get in your energy production you can use to outperform other miners, thus get more of the block subsidy and drive out inefficient miners.
Bitcoin mining de-risks investments in energy producing facilities. You always have a buyer for your energy, which is a problem especially in renewables. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
Such a horrific, unproductive use of energy is definitely a bug from a scientific perspective, maybe not for a financier.
It is very productive for a large population of the world.[0]
Not everyone gets paid in a stable currency or has easy access to it.
> Not everyone gets paid in a stable currency or has easy access to it.
Bitcoin doesn't appear to solve this issue at all. How is private manipulation of Bitcoin any different than an authoritarian manipulating the local currency? If I was in a country with unstable currency, I'd want Euro or US Dollars, not bitcoin.
As I and the video mentioned Euro and USD is not easily accessible in those countries, Bitcoin doesn't need permission though.
What you refer to as private manipulation is called supply and demand, maybe try reading Econo101 :)
Does Econ 101 cover asset bubbles or financial manipulation? It's been so long, that I can't remember, but I promise you that prices can reflect things other than supply and demand once you manage to get past that first class.
> Bitcoin doesn't need permission though
No authoritarian would EVER cut off or filter the internet in their country. Nope, has never happened, will never happen.
You're right, Myanmar just did that! Scary to think of it. Fortunately Bitcoin works over more communication protocols, but no internet is certainly not in any way easily defendable today. But i still think that physical and banked usd, euros and gold are more easily seizable by a government. A no internet scenario is probably economic suicide by any government.
I really don't get what you mean by financial manipulation in regards to bitcoin.
Bitcoin entered a speculative bubble in the middle of 2017.
The supply got less, while the demand didn't decrease. The intrinsic value increased because of the network and lindy effect, which is why institutional investors jumped in. Bitcoin entered a speculative bubble the moment the first block was created.
I would say we just don't know the price of bitcoin yet, hence the heavy volatility.
What would you price it at? Are you shorting it?
Media hype typically drives demand, not supply. Supply in bitcoin is a very fundamental concept and controversial topic, which is a function of proof of work, difficulty adjustment and block subsidy.
What exactly in supply and demand is manipulation? You can't just shout manipulation and argue with "media hype", which historically for bitcoin is very mixed[0] and affects any asset class?
I would not bet that the government is incapable of cutting off access to bitcoin.
Contrary to the Bitcoin crow I don't spend my days thinking about it so my argument may seem weak. You mention bitcoin being 'the best form of money'. Assuming there is a hierarchy of forms of money, from what I understand the main advantage of Bitcoin is that Government can not manipulate its quantity. I wonder if a world where there is no possibility for governments to use monetary policy in times of trouble to stabilize the economy is desirable.
The economy is very complicated. There are no models that can predict the output of changing its parameters. It wasn't possible before to have the properties in money that we have with bitcoin (a gold standard was easily removable by a powerful government). The current central banking system is an experiment as much as anything before it and anything that will follow.
I see it like this. I want my economic output to be measured in something that is:
- salabale over time (1 btc is always 1/21 million of the monetary base)
- salabale over space (i want to work remote)
- understandable and auditable (the bitcoin concept can be understood by everyone, the code is auditable by mid-level developers)
Why is that good? Why should I, if I have 1 bitcoin, always have ownership of a fixed proportion of the entire societal monetary base?
This seems like a great deal for someone who has a bitcoin, and a terrible situation for new workers and the economy as a whole. If the economy expands, your fixed proportion of the monetary base sees you profit off the backs of others for nothing more than sitting on currency. Not investing, not even speculating, just sitting on it.
If you don't invest your bitcoin in productive assets you will be behind peers who do that, however they carry a risk.
Today you carry risk if you don't invest your savings. However with low-income you can't, as you need emergency funds.
As an employee, in a growing economy denominated in bitcoin, you would see your pay drop frequently as the money supply gets stretched. There's no reason at all to think BTC-denominated salaries would be able to stay constant as the value of the money rises.
> I also would like to be able to save without having to put my economic output at risk.
That's not the same thing, a fixed proportion of the money supply does not guarantee that, nor is it a necessary precondition.
Further, this is not in the interest of wider society - work today should be valued more than work yesterday. If you want to grow your money, you make it work.
This is just a rehash of the problems with the gold standard now. But worse.
Assuming the world productivity is denominated in 21 million bitcoin, if world productivity grows by 3% per year, my salary of 1 bitcoin gets more purchasing power. This is where you get a lever with your employer, he needs you to earn less, you don't have to negotiate to earn more (same applies to minimum wage, it needs to be adjusted upwards in a inflationary monetary system)
Every money is inherently more valuable yesterday than today, as you can divest it. I would argue that it is very much in the interest of the wider society to have their savings not inflated.
The best way to make your money work will always be to invest it in productivity, be it in educating yourself or investing it in companies. This investments need to be a lot more smarter and more sustainable than those of today, as the base money is not worth less every year.
I think wasteful spending is a property of an inflationary money, where smart spending would be a required property in a non-inflationary money.
Like I said, most of the rest is just a rehash of gold standard stuff.
Exactly, however bitcoin is infinitely better money than gold and makes the "gold standard" viable. Fortunately the gold standard has a lot of proponents globally, some of whom started embracing bitcoin.
I just hope that the experiment bitcoin keeps on going and I'm guessing we will see some form of resolution, maybe even in this decade. There is a lot to learn still.
Do you mind giving me some of your arguments why it's terrible?
There's plenty of literature out there about the end of gold standards in various countries. The upshot of it is that economies get warped by constrained currency supply and those who already have tend to get more, over those who produce or invest.
More specifically, Austrian economics is overtly and proudly ideological rather than empirical; it is about advancing an agenda not describing reality.
It's worth taking seriously, but as a particular group’s body of theology and religious propaganda, not as science.
Your last sentence was decent; the rest of your post was... not very useful.
True, it's not so much an argument as a fact. As the other poster says, it's basically a set of idealogical positions.
> implying "go do your own research"
You're right, I shouldn't have left that to implication.
I'm not trying to win a debate here, nor am I interested in debating the merits of a system that I don't think has any.
but you are going to pay more for the same goods and services
if your bitcoin is 3% more valuable, when you use it to buy milk it's going to cost you 3% more
the game is working only because today if bitcoins increase their value you can exchange them for more fiat money
in a bitcoin economy one bitcoin is worth exactly one bitcoin, forever, whatever that buys
You seem to have it backwards, this is where the Econo101 book from the parent comment might help ;) /s
Inflation drives down the purchasing power, hence why milk gets more expensive every year, even though we get much more efficient at producing it. Remove inflation and 1 bitcoin buys you a liter today and 1.03 litres next year.
and so do salaries, they are a cost to someone ...
as long as your purchasing power stays the same salaries will go down as well.
it's simply natural.
you can't really believe that billions of people will get rich by sitting on the salary of a single year
BTW that liter of milk will generate 3% more profit to the seller. there is no incentive to lower the prices if hoarding is so rewarding
You won't get more rich by sitting on your salary, but you will also not get more poor like you do today.
If the milk seller doesn't lower his prices a competitor will do that, as he is able to do that with the bigger margin the better productivity brought.
That's a political issue, it has nothing to do with how currencies work
If the milk seller is going to lower the prices to beat competitors, workers will compete on salaries as well
nothing different from what we have now, the only difference is that rich people could amass fortunes much more easily than today
they'll just need to keep their money in the bank (i.e. their gold reserve will keep appreciating by the virtue of existing)
Rich get richer today by being closer to the money source. In the "bitcoin standard" non-rich people can even keep their money in the bank and don't lose purchasing power by not risking it.
Rich and non-rich will always want to take risk to increase their net worth, however the assets must perform much better to outperform the money. Unlike today where almost all investments appreciate when measured in fiat.
edit:
> That's a political issue, it has nothing to do with how currencies work
Would you agree that it would be a good thing if the base monetary layer would enable that? I only see that happening with a monetary policy that respects savings and is not alterable by a few elected and unelected officials
assuming they don't need the money to live and realise that 5 years ago they spent a today fortune on a liter of milk...
You assume your salary remains fixed. Why would it? As a portion of global productivity, your contribution shrinks.
Your labour certainly isn't.
Transaction rates - Artificially kept low to profit miners.
Privacy - Every Bitcoin transactions is on a public blockchain.
Transaction fees - Using Bitcoin for even one transaction a day gets expensive.
Online only - Unlike cash only works with network access.
Conformation Time - Failing to wait for conformation in effect allows double spend attacks. Think 10 people buying computer equipment from different stores at the same time.
Assuming the implementation was changed to support wider adoption, a fixed currency has significant economic issues. For example, making or taking a loan in a currency that’s gaining value quickly becomes untenable.
PS: Of course all of this could be changed, but acknowledging issues is the first step in selecting a new set of tradeoffs.
You don’t need a bitcoin backed token, lightning does it.
Transaction rates are not artificially kept low. In fact most the vast majority of the time bitcoin has excess capacity.
Privacy- this is a legitimate concern but it is improving, slowly. Taoroot and Lightning are both privacy improvements.
So your daily transactions aren't meant for bitcoin. A distributed ledger that replicates all data globally for eternity is not an appropriate method for recording coffee purchases. Though I have done it. Bitcoin makes sense for settlement, and lightning is appropriate for coffee.
That said, I regularly clear bitcoin transactions for $1 or less in fees, and it is cheaper then every other form of payment in the world. You may think a SWIFT transaction is “free”, but its merely the cost is hidden. And don’t forget the inflation tax, that is a global wealth tax on any money held in an inflating currency. So compared to that, $1 to send $100 is cheap.
Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is.
Lightning allows speed without double spend problems. Personally when moving large (for me) amounts of money I font mind waiting an hour for the confirmations. I certainly won’t trust a payment without them.
But bitcoin is voluntary, it doesn't have to be perfect in every regard.
You can look it up, larger blocks where allowed in the past, 1MB is a completely arbitrary size that was overkill at the time but hasn’t increased. Even 1$ transactions are quite expensive though they are often much higher.
The lighting network has it’s own separate set of issues. It’s Bitcoin backed but loses some of Bitcoins advantages: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.08513.pdf
> Online Only- I don’t think there is a solution to this criticism, but not sure what the issue is.
It’s simply a dependency. Shops may have issues accepting CC payments after a hurricane for example, but they can always take cash.
The biggest problem with bitcoin is that scammers spread FUD to justify their scam coins and too many people believe the FUD.
You are repeating FUD here and basing it in your non-understanding of how bitcoin works.
The fact that I need to connect to some peer-to-peer network or third party service for every transaction is a limiting factor. It reduces the efficiency of the system and increases latency, and it adds additional points of failure.
In fact it can be solved for electronic transactions and there is a mountain of published research on the topic that dates back to the late 80s. Here is a recent research paper:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1220.pdf
The idea is to ensure that users who attempt to double spend can be identified and penalized later (e.g. by being added to a blacklist; some systems actually ensure that all transactions in which the cheating user participated can be identified, so merchants who try to evade the blacklist can also be penalized). The money has to be issued by a bank under the security definition. If anonymity is not a requirement -- and presumably a Bitcoin enthusiast does not care about anonymity since Bitcoin is not anonymous -- this can be easily achieved by using ordinary digital signatures.
The credit card network, by the way, is much worse in this regard.
The value of the US dollar as a reserve currency is a faith-based article, and yet it works well. The confidence in the Fed to not unduly dilute the value has reinforced the resolve of the participants to continue to accept it as currency.
Bitcoin's paid many years of dues in this regard as well, and its garnered the confidence of its market participants despite its deficiencies.
Transaction clearance - Artificially kept centralised to keep states control supply.
Privacy - Every bank transaction requires real names.
Artificial scarcity - If everyone tried to withdraw the money from their banking accounts at or around the same time, all the banknotes in circulation would be unable to cover all the demand.
This is needed as otherwise banks could claim to have unlimited funds.
Bank notes provide privacy and are created on demand. Having 1:1 bank notes to M1 money supply would simply be wasteful.
I don't have any opinion about Bitcoin one way or another, though through these fascinating arguments I gain new insight about the money and its relationship with geopolitics, human civilisation and other aspects.
[1] https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-da...
I have yet to have an economist explain to me why deflation us bad- computers getting cheaper is good, fixed income people being able to afford things us good. Inflation mainly allows government to hand out money yo wall street in exchange for bribes at the expense of everyone else. That’s not good.
You are confusing the consumer price index for “inflation”. It’s understandable, this lie is one of the earlier examples of fake news.
When the fed prints money it goes to wall street and politically connected people. (This is quite literally the definition of fascism- a private economy run by government)
Wall Street profits from the inflation, but the rest of the people get poorer.
Also people that put their money in the stock market for the long term will do much better than others. Even if they are poor, it doesn’t matter. Just buy SP500 with all the money you can spare.
At worst inflation is a tax on ignorance. If you keep buying crap you don’t need with your dollars instead of investing... it will suck for you.
What about those that are so poor that have zero money to spare in the first place? Well, that’s a situation that shouldn’t even exist. That’s why I live in European Social democracy where governments actually distribute wealth.
The US is not Zimbabwe. It’s not even comparable.
You can literally shove those dollars down the throat of the rest of the world for as long as the status quo is maintained.
At risk of being the "Let Me Google That For You" Guy, it's not too hard to find articles where economists give cases against deflation, e.g.:
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/5-reasons-to-worry-about-...
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/978/economics/definition-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-is-deflation-bad
The basic argument is that in small amounts, both inflation and deflation can be fine, but either one can become a problem. The issues with too much inflation are fairly obvious; the issues with too much deflation is that downward price pressure falls on everything. If deflation is so reliable that prices are going to be meaningfully lower if I can put off a big purchase for as long as possible, I'm going to do that. If enough people follow my lead, that hurts sellers. Wages go down -- more than likely through layoffs rather than pay cuts. And anyone who's already in debt -- and this doesn't just include your Uncle Bob who routinely puts too much on his credit card, it includes companies using lines of credit -- can end up in real trouble.
> computers getting cheaper is good
Sure, but -- even though I've seen this example trotted out before as a pro-deflation argument -- the prices of manufactured goods steadily fall due to continual improvements in manufacturing processes, economies of scale, and general technological progress. This has been particularly noticeable in computers over the last three decades, but Moore's Law isn't a supporting argument for the benefits of monetary deflation.
Asserting that an argument is not an argument is not a rebuttal.
The claim that people having more purchasing power will stop the economy is self serving for inflationists and never supported by evidence.
In fact the opposite has been the case time and time again.
As I proved in the example you simply ignored.
So, like I said, I have never seen an argument. Just these kinds of self serving assertions.
There are a few different issues. First, volatility is universally bad for a currency, because it makes all transactions in the currency more risky. Money should always be a medium of exchange first and foremost; there should be little to no room for speculating on the value of money and people should not have to factor in unexpected changes in the value of money when determining prices. In general people will switch from more volatile to less volatile currencies because less volatile currencies make trade more efficient.
Unexpected deflation is particularly bad, because in addition to the general problems with volatility, it also triggers defaults on loans (because money becomes more difficult to obtain). Too many defaults in too short a period of time will create a "contagion" effect by reducing the collateral held by lenders (who use loans as collateral for their own debts), which triggers even more defaults. Worse, as lenders see their collateral vanish, they will try to make up the difference with money, taking money out of circulation and causing even more deflation and thus more defaults. This is the "deflationary spiral" scenario.
Inflation is not some trick to hand money over to "Wall St." Rather, a low, predictable rate of inflation is targeted so that there will be some "breathing room" during an economic crisis. It does not hurt people on a fixed income because it can be planned for and the fixed income can be adjusted for inflation (e.g. someone could hold a portfolio of TIPS). It also has nothing to do with the price of computers, which have become cheaper because of economic growth (and in fact have become cheaper over decades of inflation). Inflation also encourages investment activity by discouraging the hoarding of money, which is a good thing for the economy.
And I assure you, as someone who holds bitcoin that has greatly appreciated, I can’t wait to spend it on things that depreciate.
In fact my spending has increased now that my spending power has increased dramatically.
As for what we should expect...why should the current situation be so surprising? The vast majority of merchants who "accept Bitcoin" use a third party payment processor that immediately converts Bitcoin into a fiat currency. The number of people who use Bitcoin as money, rather than as a system to communicate payments made in some other currency, is vanishingly small. The "technology industry" has mostly focused on non-monetary applications of blockchains and a lot of attention has been paid to "permissioned" blockchains because they are overwhelmingly more efficient.
In the context of deflation goods getting 'cheaper' simply means that their nominal price falls, while real prices remain constant. If you thought that deflation makes people richer (or that inflation makes people poorer) then you were wrong.
Bitcoin fixes this.
Remember, if you have money in an interest generating account then you don’t have actual cash you have an IOU for cash with whatever institution you deposited that money with. Now, changes to the inflation rate or hyper inflation are another story, but consistent ~1.5% inflation is the goal.
Is this going to be a new slur from the community?
Compare someone with a billion dollars and someone with 0 dollars today. Then huge inflation comes... who lost more purchasing power? Not the person with zero dollars, that’s for sure!
You really need to take a step back and start thinking because there are multiple people here spending their time and energy trying to explain something basic to you from first principles. Have some self doubt about your worldview. You are dismissing sound logic based on what? Most of the things you reply don’t even make sense.
1 bitcoin will always buy more and more and more and more. So you have zero incentive to spend your money today and you have all the incentive to wait as far as you possibly can before spending anything. The economy would grind to halt. Isn't this obvious?
Besides, rich people can sit on their money instead of re-investing. They will never have to work and neither will their descendants. You basically established some kind of stupid cyberpunk feudalism.
Computers get cheaper every year such that even inflated dollars can be held to get a better computer next year.
And yet the technology industry has not ground to a halt. Food is low tech, cell phones are high tech.
It is obvious- this argument in favor of government being able to debase the currency to fund wars and somehow that’s good for poor people is never going to hold water.
But here is another thought- no matter how much you call it stupid, or fuedalistic, leftists gave been making this argument fir over a decade now and Bitcoin has only gotten stronger.
You may even be able to make it “illegal” if you ignore the constitution and laws, but you cannot stop it.
Bitcoin will be the tool that liberates the people out from under your technocratic thumb.
Thats what I find most exciting.
I think you really have poor mental models of the world. I'm sorry but there's not even anything else I can say.
In other words, you must cover the cost of vastly more energy per Bitcoin transaction compared to the mainstream financial system. Environmental concerns aside, that amounts to a huge tax on every transaction that reduces the economic efficiency of the system. Note also that this is a per-transaction tax, regardless of transaction size, making Bitcoin less useful for small transactions.
There is also the fact that such a high energy cost per transaction causes the value of Bitcoin to be more strongly correlated with the price of energy. Energy prices are notoriously volatile; hence Bitcoin's value will also be volatile. Volatility makes a currency less useful (it introduces risk into every transaction and disincentives investment) and a very volatile currency will eventually be abandoned entirely. It should surprise nobody that the overwhelming majority of merchants who "accept cryptocurrency" as payment do so via services that immediately convert that cryptocurrency payment into their local fiat currency, because the majority of the world's fiat currencies have very stable values (compared to Bitcoin etc.).
I could go on but to be honest the technical objections to Bitcoin outweigh the economic objections, at least in my opinion. Happy to get into those objections as well if anyone is interested.
Also, as you noted the energy usage is correlated with the value, not the transaction rate. Transaction rate limits could be changed arbitrarily without affecting the energy usage of the coin.
However you have the causal relationship backwards: The value of the coin determines what level of electricity spending is profitable for miners. The electricity spending of miners doesn't determine the value.
The transaction rate is not what matters; what matters is the energy spent per transaction. Visa process many more transactions for much less energy than Bitcoin, and is therefore more efficient. I suspect Western Union's energy consumption is roughly in proportion to Visa's, but I have no data (the Visa example comes right out of their annual report, which covers both the number of transactions and amount of energy consumed).
"The electricity spending of miners doesn't determine the value."
The energy cost determines the transaction fees. Higher transaction fees make Bitcoin less valuable by imposing a greater burden on using the system. Yes, there are other factors that determine price of Bitcoin, but if nothing else changed ("all things being equal") then volatility in energy prices would trigger volatility in transaction fees and thus volatility in Bitcoin's overall value.
> Higher transaction fees make Bitcoin less valuable by imposing a greater burden on using the system ... volatility in energy prices would trigger volatility in transaction fees and thus volatility in Bitcoin's overall value.
Good point, that is certainly a risk with Bitcoin.
EDIT: Actually thinking about it more I'm not sure why this would be true. Since the transaction rate is not related to the number of miners, volatility in energy prices might cause miners to enter/leave the system but I don't see why it would impact the coin prices.
The reason it impacts coin prices is that higher transaction fees make Bitcoin less desirable as a medium of exchange and reduces demand. To put it another way, let's say I am paid in Bitcoin. If transaction fees increase, I will need to demand a higher nominal salary, at least enough to cover the transaction fees incurred when I spend my salary. Likewise, any merchants that accept Bitcoin payments will raise their prices, to cover the fees they will have to pay. Yet the same work is being done and the same goods are being sold; hence, inflation, or in other words, the value of Bitcoin has decreased.
Miners can't choose the transaction fees, they will either process the most expensive transactions they see or just stop mining. If they stop mining, that doesn't impact the rate of transactions that can be processed.
Obviously everything I described is a simplified model where energy costs change equally for all miners. The real world is not that simple, but there is some correlation in energy costs across different regions as there is a global market for typical fuels (coal, natural gas, uranium, etc.).
It is also important to remember that transaction fees are not in proportion to transaction sizes. People doing large Bitcoin transactions could absorb much higher fees, so in all likelihood nobody would be priced out of the market (and Bitcoin would be dominated by large transactions, which is more or less the case right now).
Miners will shut their equipment down as soon as the electricity costs become greater than the rewards. When some of the miners shut their equipment down, that causes a difficulty change which makes mining profitable again for the remaining miners, and also keeps the transaction rate the same. The miners have no way to impact what transaction fees are acceptable because they have no control over the transaction rate.
Btc is not replacing visa. Btc is replacing central banks. The appropriate comparison here is what is the energy cost of the banking infrastructure of the incumbent system.
>Environmental concerns aside I am concerned that you are using electricity to power your computer, access the internet, and comment on HN. Are you the arbiter of "moral" energy use? Am I? Slippery slope, and an anti-human one at that.
>Energy prices are notoriously volatile; hence Bitcoin's value will also be volatile.
This is not how it works. There is an argument to be made for risk of on-grid miners sudden increase of electricity prices in the case of a power shortage. Miners don't like this type of risk, so they choose to locate at places with abundant supplies and stables prices of electricity. Miners sign long-term electricity agreements. Risk to off grid miners is another level removed from on grid miners.
>will eventually be abandoned entirely. According to how you feel? All signs point otherwise.
>the technical objections to Bitcoin outweigh the economic objections You are free to make your own fork, BIP, or new "crypto" and compete. Good luck. By the way, there are 7999 "crypto" coins competing and losing so far.
Without regulation or FDIC insurance, very few people would be willing to give their bitcoins to a bank so that it could be lent out to people who have a better use for it. Even if a Bitcoin bank could exist, an economic downturn could cause a liquidity crisis, where everyone tries to withdraw their Bitcoin at once. The banks would have no way of returning the Bitcoins to many of their customers. Because there is no central bank that can print out Bitcoin, the entire Bitcoin financial system would be in ruin following the crisis.
I took more than 101, and not sure what you refer to there.
The market decides. Not an economics "expert", nor fitting btc to an arbitrary theoretical definition of money.
>It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented.
Are you aware of the Austrian school of economics?
The Austrian school of economics is completely adverse to empirical data, which makes it functionally useless.
The only school of economic thought that is built upon the rejection of the scientific method.
When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone else to do it for them. So all transactions within a country would happen in a local currency and then once in a while "settlement" would happen.
Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. For eg I could start a new Stable coin called MyDogeCoin HQed in Switzerland and each MyDogeCoin is backed by 1 Bitcoin. Anyone who trusts me can transact in MyDogeCoins and can convert their MyDogeCoins into Bitcoins if they are willing to wait and pay a sizable fee to account for Bitcoins slowness. However most people don't need this it just needs to be possible. Now anyone using MyDogeCoin can send money to each other quickly as long as they trust me. This isn't any different to how you trust a country. And many countries like Zimbabwe aren't trust worthy at all. This has BTC behind it.
Now suppose you want to send MyDogeCoin to MyMemeCoin HQed in Singapore and is similar. We trust each other and hence we do the transfer. Once in a while we do a "settlement" on the BTC blockchain. This way we don't need that many TPS. And large untrusted nodes can use the BTC blockchain as a trustless settlement layer.
Since BTC is the final trustless layer its a foundation. Now I realized how BTC can have long term value and it could be around even a 100 years from now. Doesn't mean its not over priced now but it will have a non zero value over the long term and is revolutionary. Unless the government goes to war against it. The US government used to use gold and then basically defaulted and forced everyone to accept dollars by force. Thats not sustainable.
What are the implications of this on the network stability wrt mining? Doesn't bitcoin need transaction volume to remain a stable network?
My read is that the incentive structure changes. Right now, miners are motivated by block rewards. In the future, they'll be motivated by transaction fees. If transactions are rare, mining profitably is going to become much more difficult. Pair this with 51% attacks, and the long ramp-up of mining capabilities starts to look like it will regress after the the rewards go to zero. Can the network survive that?
Also remember if you have wealth in bitcoin you would likely mine at a loss merely to secure your own bitcoin.
I can’t imagine mining going away.
I think every appliance in a household will end up mining a little bit and it will be intrinsic to the fabric of the economy. The way the internet is now.
You could also send null transactions which do nothing but pay a transaction fee
You make an excellent point!
I'm not convinced that you actually do have to make too many assumptions. The claim I'm making here is that bitcoin has had a steady and predictable increase in mining demand as the currency has grown, but that iff bitcoin becomes solely a low-volume high-value settlement platform (instead of a buy-coffee high-volume low-value blockchain), there will be a demand shock once the block rewards go to zero. You can reason about this while keeping the hashrates and cost of achieving that hashrate abstract.
If volume grows, this argument is moot because there will be plenty of transaction fees to gobble.
Transaction volumes over time have risen as well. If bitcoin has amy value to society in 113 years, people will pay to transact it. Whether that is one expensive transaction a month or a million every block I don’t know— but I think the latter is more likely.
This is not in line with my understanding if BTC. The difficulty adjusts automatically, so the real cost isn’t hashing, but energy. And there is no inherent reason why any less energy would be spent/wasted on mining/securing BTC (assuming it will be worth more than today).
I expect it will be cheap the way wifi is cheap on a raspberry pi. They just include it because you may use it and it’s cheaper to include it than to make both a version with and a version without the WiFi module. (If you inly use WIFI, then the sane argument goes for the redundant-to-you ethernet port.)
You are right about difficulty factor, but that just adjusts how fast blocks are won based on past 2 weeks.
Even when price of BRC has crashed, hash power doesn’t instantly go away.
Also an attack lets you re-organize recent blocks only. Increased depth gets more expensive pretty quick.
If mining chips are cheap and ubiquitous, then an attack us very hard, because you have to beat all the existing honest chips with your attack.
If mining is cheap to attack, the rewards of such an attack will be low.
If bitcoin is valuable, it will be expensive to attack.
Simplifying a bit to support your analogy:
Bitcoin lets you lock coins on the chain for a certain amount of time. Two people can do this, then trade bitcoin transactions back and forth without submitting them.
For example, I lock coins and give my coworker a bitcoin transaction I have signed giving him $10 worth of bitcoin for my share of the days lunch. Next day he fives me one for $13 for his share, and I give the restaurant $43 for the bill— all these transactions are literally trading bitcoin IOUs, but in a nearly trustless way.
This means a great deal of transactions can happen off chain without the risk of theft.
Then there are centralized credit networks backed by Bitcoin. Paypal and Visa (with a custodian / bank) already provide this, in combination with a seamless exchange to local currency that is accepted by the merchant. For custodians, it's possible to algorithmically prove reserves, so that every user can verify that their "bitcoin IOU" is backed by actual bitcoin, but no one currently provides this afaik.
I found 3 instances of "defaults" over the history of the U.S. Federal Government[0], and I cannot figure out to which of those occurrences you might be referring. Bretton Woods was the agreement that made the USD the world's reserve currency, and that lasted for 30ish years while the U.S. was still on the gold standard.
[0] Has the U.S. Government Ever "Defaulted"? https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44704.pdf
It's solving /some/ problems, for /some/ people, maybe businessmen that create jobs or wealth even.
Sure, but by that logic, selling crack cocaine solves some problems for some people, maybe businessmen that create jobs or even wealth.
Venezuelans and Iranians aren't using crypto in any large numbers outside the dreams of speculators. Real people who actually need to do commerce prefer to transact in USD when the local currency falls short. You're never going to lose all your dollars because somebody guessed your email password.
Paypal closes your account (after letting you deposit some amount which they will hold for 6 months before letting you wire it out to some other normal bank account) if you're Venezuelan.
Transferwise doesn't even serve Venezuelans and when they decided to stop serving us, a friend got his account blocked (he signed up before they banned Venezuelans) and unlike Paypal they just kept the money with no option to withdraw it.
Venezuelan bank accounts cannot receive international wire transfers.
Colombia/Brazil, the nearest countries (a round trip could cost you less than $200 pre-pandemic) don't let Venezuelans open up bank accounts unless they got a residence card.
This is in part due to USA sanctions, but the Venezuelan government is also at fault too (currency exchange controls, etc).
Ironically, USA is where it's easiest for a Venezuelan to open up a bank account. But pre-pandemic you had to spend more than $1000 (now it's more) in travel and accommodation to the USA to accomplish this. Not to mention you need a Visa.
It's also relatively easy and cheap (less than $1k) to remotely open up a business + bank account, again in USA, and do business through there which is what people are starting to do now (even though it's been possible since years ago if I'm not mistaken).
This is what I'm about to do in order to be able to do business (i'm a freelance programming contractor) with my clients easier, but it's still more expensive and harder than just set up a wallet + a localbitcoins account.
Yes, my aunt isn't going to buy bread with bitcoin, we all know that, but thanks to bitcoin her daughter can get paid as freelance Graphics Designer by her clients. Lots of remittance going on through bitcoin too.
Bitcoin has gone from pennies, to around $100 for a year, to around $1000 for a year or two, to between $20000 and $3000 for a few years, and now to $50-60k.
I guess you could argue that this is just going to take a few decades to stabilize, but that’s a pretty big bet, and a pretty weird way to design the next monetary framework.
There was a pretty interesting Clubhouse discussion on the weekend where Eric Weinstein praised the genius of Bitcoin but bemoaned the stupidity of its design (“a QWERTY problem”), and Lex Fridman tried to charitably compare Bitcoin to JavaScript as a flawed tech that had great distribution and has been making the best of it since then. They were both rudely dismissed by a group of Bitcoin maximalists as “not getting it”.
The question I’ve asked since the start is, if this is a functional idea, why is the dumb beta version still the dominant implementation? There’s a bizarre religiousity and post hoc rationalizations for some of the weirdest decisions in its design, and mistaking speculative mania and nominal price for success, while proposed uses for Bitcoin and the blockchain have been quietly discarded. Bitcoin’s valuation is more of a symptom of post-2008 monetary conditions than a long-term challenge to them.
(I'm drawing a comparison to gold here, but this is also true for other commodities, and for that matter, stocks.)
That's an important point, because it prompts the question: what is the problem that Bitcoin is solving if the preferable outcome is that it does exactly the same things that gold and centralized banks already do?
The more that I hear people justify slow transaction times, high fees, and a general lack of platform evolution, the more it sounds to me like the only problem that Bitcoin is solving in the real world is that gold is already stable, and speculators need a new thing to jump on. The arguments people are making today about why slow transactions are irrelevant are not the same arguments that people were making when Bitcoin was new. It's revisionist history. And when people are talking about centralization as the end goal... this is also part of why I'm skeptical about claims that proof of stake is going to solve anything on the environmental front, or that microtransactions are ever actually going to get better.
The overwhelming perspective I'm seeing here is that nobody involved in speculating on Bitcoin cares about the technological side at all, and I don't see what incentive there is for anyone to make mining easier, cheaper, more democratic, or more environmentally friendly. The whole point seems to be that people want to get in early and then erect as high barriers of entry as possible. What makes people think that anyone speculating on Bitcoin is going to care about proof of stake? At the point where bitcoin becomes a nationally backed currency that is just a backbone for other smaller systems and is (for most people) completely independent from their regular everyday transactions -- there's no advantage to creating that world, that is the world we already have. The only difference is that a few people on Reddit haven't gotten rich off of the world we have.
The fact that the majority of the market is still standardized on Bitcoin despite a plurality of clearly better coins drives home to me that the discussion about Bitcoin has nothing to do with practical merits of the system, and everything to do with a bunch of people trying to extract as much money as possible before tragedy of the commons sets in. We can make centralized banks without bitcoin. If that's the end goal, then we should absolutely get rid of the blockchain because blockchain is not necessary for a centralized bank exchange with a small number of government-level actors.
I'm surrounded by people who tell me that Bitcoin is a giant innovation, but who are then openly hostile to any kind of improvement to the platform and who are continually dismissing valid criticisms of its technology and governance model as irrelevant because those criticisms don't directly impact Bitcoin's value as a purely speculative currency. What you're describing when you propose a single, centralized exchange is, "we want to make banks a second time the same way, except less efficiently with fundamentally outdated technology, because we want some of the pie this time."
Which, great, but as a non-speculator, why on earth should I support that or care about it?
So when you think about tracking on-chain transactions, what you're really talking about is tracking government-level, giant transactions that are largely divorced from the kind of detailed forensics that people would want to do. Which... there are better ways to audit giant government-level agencies than a blockchain.
Similarly, leveraging the blockchain to handle things like proof-of-identity doesn't work if the transaction speed for ordinary people can't keep up. If you want to use Bitcoin for proof of identity transactions, you need ordinary people interacting with the network, not a central exchange. Because again, if you have a few central exchanges that everyone is interacting with, then it's almost strictly better to just let them handle proof of identity and proof of ownership in shared centralized databases.
The only reason Bitcoin could matter is if it actually did scale enough that it was feasible for ordinary people to use it for micro-transactions and as a performant, robust API. But the problem is that Bitcoin as a technology is poorly suited for that use case, and none of the people hyping are interesting in solving those problems, evolving the technology, or moving to other coins that would be better suited.
In a world with centralized exchanges and secondary layers on top of bitcoin that consolidate and batch transactions, all of the problems you're describing end up being easier and better to solve by just having the centralized exchanges coordinate with each other, the same way that banks already do. And to the extent that banks don't coordinate with each other right now, it's unrealistic to assume that the blockchain is going to suddenly change their incentives or force them to do so.
What the article doesn't explain is why decentralized consensus and ledgers matter for a system that is increasingly obviously designed to be centralized and used in a centralized manner.
Yes, Bitcoin allows transaction resolution in a distributed ledger. The problem is that everything else around Bitcoin's design, implementation, and community is ill-suited for creating a decentralized currency. There are a hundred coins out there that use a blockchain to "create time". The article does not explain why Bitcoin in specific is worth paying attention to, other than because speculators are currently already paying attention to it.
And frankly, it's not at all true that no other coins have come around that are better. Monero is vastly better at privacy than Bitcoin in pretty much every way. There are already coins on the market that are using proof of stake today. In pretty much every area, the state of cryptocurrency has evolved over Bitcoin -- but, importantly, none of those coins have become better systems for speculative investing. And I would argue that's the "better enough" that most Bitcoin advocates care about.
I also don't see any reason to assume that once Bitcoin goes more mainstream that a community that is currently hostile to change because it might affect their wallets is suddenly going to be less hostile to change. Bitcoin could be evolving today. People could be switching to better coins today. But they're not. It's not going to be easier to make those improvements in the future.
Bitcoin is the technology. The idea that we need wide adoption of a technology that is ill suited for the problem it is trying to solve, just so that we can drop that technology and choose something that's actually usable on its own without first reimplementing the entire concept of banks -- it just doesn't make sense as a long-term strategy.
But Bitcoin is particularly bad at everything surrounding the concept of a distributed ledger. In fact, it is set up in such a way as to make working with its distributed ledger more difficult than it needs to be. It was an interesting first pass at this technology, but it has been very clearly surpassed by other coins in pretty much every single way.
So the question is, given that Bitcoin is particularly bad at what it does, given that other cryptocurrencies are doing the same things that the article praises except better, why are people sticking with an outdated technology? I would posit that people who are really genuinely excited about concepts of "creating time" would be moving to better coins that are doing even more clever things than Bitcoin is, and the people who remain are largely remaining because they're interested in the speculation part and for them concepts like "first to market" are very important.
But I don't see how anybody would ever say they prefer Bitcoin because of the technology. It's outdated.
This is a feature, not a bug. It is very difficult to change the protocol. We have a 100% certain monetary policy.
I agree with you that perception of what btc is and isn't changes with time.
If you have a proposal, you are free to create and propose a BIP, or fork off.
Good luck.
Of course, rich people have always done that (post hoc justifications for their wealth), but when that wealth is not codified and protected by anything other than speculative value, it just increases the volume of that effect even more. The lack of technical fundamental superiority of Bitcoin vs other approaches (and no need to mention alternatives, y’all know them) increases the fervor of defense of Bitcoin as that’s basically the only thing keeping it up.
Anyway, as long as Bitcoin has perceived social value, it may still have niche uses like allowing you to get money out of Venezuela. And maybe slightly cheaper than wiring large amounts of money.
So actually you’re left with just: 1) pure social perceived value and 2) small use case when you have utter failure of the formal financial system. The first case is a self-licking ice cream cone, but... Unfortunately, #2 could end up being a self-licking ice cream cone, too, because now you have a bunch of people kind of invested in the formal system failing. I’m not really worried about it as the number of Bitcoin true believers is low vs the total population (and there have often been such people with a stake in system failure), but it is something to keep in mind.
But not everyone just acts mechanically in response to financial incentives, as there are some cryptocurrency advocates who see the need to shore up the formal system and advocate for that.
Any ledger which represents value in a purely abstract sense has to start at zero value— and any ledger which represents ownership of some concrete asset has to be kept aligned with reality, which makes it a nonstarter for a trustless, distributed system.
As an aside, the value of "one Bitcoin" is a bit of a distraction: market cap is the relevant measure, as long as we're using an existing currency as the unit of account, and the only market cap at which a distributed ledger could be relatively stable is many trillions of dollars.
So, for a trustless and decentralized ledger to become the next monetary framework through voluntary action, it has to start cheap, and persist for long enough to become expensive. There's simply no other way of doing it.
As for why Bitcoin, and not some other cybercoin: well, jury is out, isn't it? But money exhibits very strong network effects, and Bitcoin's first-mover advantage is considerable. A global marketplace doesn't have any reliable way to communicate other than price signals, and either BTC forms a Schelling point as the new baseline store of value, or it doesn't.
It hasn't yet, but it remains the most credible candidate. If you were a small central bank, nervous about the effect of 2020 USD and EUR printing on the buying power of your foreign exchange reserves, and you wanted to buy a little chunk of some distributed ledger "just in case", which one would you pick? Probably the first one you heard of, and the one with the largest market cap: Bitcoin and BTC, respectively.
But it's always kind of vague what is fundamentally different about this imaginary, perfected version of bitcoin. Is it the block size, i.e. Bitcoin Cash is really the ideal bitcoin? Seems highly debatable, but anyhow, the block size is a debate about tradeoffs between centralization and throughput rather than an obviously embarrassing decision. Or is it more about the issuance schedule and supply cap?
Generally, if the current bitcoin is an embarrassing beta version that we're stuck with due to network effect, what does the better bitcoin look like? Does it exist already? That seems like a more interesting conversation than a meta-discussion about why we're stuck with this "dumb beta version" or why bitcoin maximalists are so mean.
https://medium.com/sora-xor/sora-the-new-economic-order-3ec3...
Personally I suspect that eventually a more modern blockchain will become the base level of record, or more likely that we may never settle on a single one, but indeed with proper layering it could all be BTC in the end.
Sounds like something straight out of The Bitcoin Standard [1].
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin-sta...
What if it "was"?
The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.
Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS. The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions. Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.
The "killer app" of Bitcoin is the shared CPU power / consensus, not necessarily the plain layer-1 transactions.
"Most transactions cancel out at the account level. The binks demand bitcoins of each other only because they don't want to hold account money for too long. So a relatively small amount of bitcoins infrequently transacted can support a somewhat larger amount of account money frequently transacted."
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/th...
> satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days
And it did. I don't think today still classifies as "early". See above for people already thinking far ahead for longterm solutions to scaling.
There is no way Tx of average humans would significantly cancel out within the time of a block. Thats why LN just makes the time to settlement "infinite" and that's why it partially increases centralization again to cancel out more Tx. If that was the goal it could have been implemented in layer 1.
Anyway all that aside, lets just assume LN would work as perfectly as the devs hope it will do one day. Its sill way worse than existing FBA solutions that can handle most of this on layer 1 directly and already have fully working second layer (payment channels) implemented. Even if bitcoin and LN could eventually provide a similar good solution, whats the point if it already exists and why would anyone assume the existing solutions stop evolving while bitcoin and LN slowly catches up? If we assume LN has reached all its goals in 10 years it also means the goals are outdated by 10 years.
We can arguing about what LN may be capable of doing one day but its never gonna be a valid argument against solution that deliver today.
So, while Satoshi’s opinion isnt really relevant to bitcoin’s future, since you brought it up, Satoshi clearly didn't think layer one was the inly way yo go.
And if LN would actually reduce on chain Tx to a level where we would no longer need to worry about on-chain limits then we rendered bitcoin useless because we literally reduced the need for Tx to basically zero. Whos gonna pay for mining if block rewards vanish and LN makes on-chain Tx vanish as well?
Bitcoins "goal" is that on-chain Tx should always be near the max so the fee per Tx is the lowest possible and reward are the highest While LNs "goal" would be to reduce the on-chain Tx to near zero because every on-chain Tx is extremely expensive.
It probably meets somewhere in the middle. which means its still gets worse and worse the more Tx are made even if they are made over LN. Thats the definition of "not scaling well".
LN and bitcoin are supposed to by a symbiosis but LN is the parasite that works best when it almost kills is own host. You can see it though the actions of large miners. They are not supporting LN. They could pour millions in the development and advertisement of LN but they dont want it, it reduces their profit.
Its just very very deeply flawed overly complex system that only exist because some people would not accept that the layer 1 has deep flaws. Is rather obvious that building on top is not the right way forward. An since changing layer 1 is not possible in any meaningful way the only way forward is to abandon it. Which wont happen as long as people make money with it.
>what exactly would stop it from working?
The absolute end state is that hashrate drops or stops increasing due to the fact that it isn't profitable anymore which leads to double spend and essentially destroys any trust in the system and renders it useless.
No one know at which point hashing will no longer be profitable for a long enough time to cause this cascading effect. But once it started the price crashes > pushes more miners out of businesses > further reducing hash rate > panic > price drop more > repeat
All while mining hardware becomes cheap because demand goes to zero and supply increases, which makes a double spending attack cheaper. Then once a double spend has been observed its game over. There inst even a theoretical plan how to move on at that point. In simple words it would move the requirement for block conformations to infinite so there is no point in doing any Tx anymore. Everyone just has to wait which further reduces any rewards for miners.
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.
That’s changing everything.
Also increases cost because you add additional parties in the system who wants to get paid for providing the service and liquidity. It simply can not provide a better service in the end.
The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
I remember when I first heard of Bitcoin. I quite frankly found it technically intimidating. It was a totally new concept. I didn't get it. I took my own discomfort as a sort of signal that it was really important; something totally new. So I studied it. I had to put time and effort to read the books, play with the code... Eventually I got it and found it to be one of the most elegant pieces of technology and sociology of my lifetime.
I think a lot of geeks never made that first push past the intimidation. As the value has gone up, the sour grapes have as well. This is a group of people that should have been first on the wagon, but instead many of us found out the hard way we weren't on the cutting edge as much as we liked to think. Myself included, I have some Bitcoin but I'm not a BTC millionaire, like I would have been had I pushed harder through my intimidation faster.
I too wish I’d made more effort to buy it earlier. Presumably that sentiment applies to the majority of humans on earth, whether you are now a Bitcoin millionaire or not.
There is something to say for incentives. The positive incentive loop is what drives adoption, innovation, security etc.
My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.
Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.
But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.
Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.
The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future. For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would not scale.
Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.
Compared to FBA solutions with block times in the single digit seconds and TPS way over 1000 These improvements are as irrelevant as its gets. There is no proposed way to make bitcoin scale to any level that would make it useful on a global scale. And the fun part is, even a proposal that could do this would not go trough. It would just lead to another fork.
If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.
You fell for the meme...
Energy consumption as compared to what? What energy sources? This line of argumentation feels very misleading to me and always has because it is presented with a very specific framing. Here's an alternative framing for example:
https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...
At least you sold high, so good on you!
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 not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.
See: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/chris_peikert_joins_... and https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-contributes...
Intentional forking as a feature is ofc still possible. Validators owner who disagree with an amendment to the point that if it is accepted they would want to stay on the "old chain" and thus fork it, can simply remove the "yes" votes from their validator list essentially ignoring their votes and thus separate from each other. By the time one cluster enabled an amendment and the separated cluster does not, a fork happens*. This requires some kind of coordination and is unlikely to happen unexpected. A largely unpopular amendment would simply not reach the 80%. And one that reached 80% is unlikely to be consider so bad by the remaining 20% that they would want to fork. But the possibility is there it just never happened in the 8+ years its running.
*ofc it would also go the other way around. An amendment that wont reach 80% could also cause a cluster to intentionally separate and enable it there which would also case a fork.
The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"
Your answer seems to be the answer to the question "How can we prevent forks?"
"Uncertainty" is certainly getting at some sort of answer, but falls short as you're not really explaining what kind of uncertainty and why it's bad in the first place.
Yes uncertainty was the answer. If a fork happens you dont know which side is going to die or if both keep going on. You dont know which sides coin someone wants if he wants to be paid in the coin named prior to the fork. You may not even know there is a fork because it happen on accident and is only discovered after it happened.
I would say this is the "threat" the "bad part" and it is bad because it is unwanted by most users of the system but that's just my opinion. There is now way to proof its unwanted by most user nor does that mean its bad for everyone. So this goes nowhere. If you think its good I'm happy to agree that this is purely an opinion.
A controlled/planed intentional fork seems to be what I assume most people would want but that again is "good" solely because its my opinion.
Hence my message pointed out the fact that we can have the "good" part about forks without the "bad" part about forks if the system prevents the "bad kind" of forks to happen. Your message already pointed out the benefit of forking and preventing unintentional forking would not affect these benefits.
Now to the other part which was really just an example how another system managed to prevent unintentional forking without preventing forking itself. I'm sure there are tons of other solutions so the fact that you don't seem to like this one is kinda irrelevant, it was just the example that I know best and was probably the first around.
Still gonna "fact check" this because why not^^ You seem to be confusing stuff. I wont go any further into a discussion about that tho because quite frankly its all out there to read for anyone who cares. It not my goal to shill stuff or prevent people from reading and believing whatever FUD they choose. Everything can be verified, no need to trust what I tell you, its all public since many many years.
First, the XRPL is not a cryptocurrency and I never said it is, its a distributed ledger. XRP is a cryptocurrency/digital asset/token whatever you wanna call it. There is no consent over the definition for these words so its not really debatable.
The XRPL is however definitely "properly decentralized" regardless of what FUD you may have read about it. Decentralization is rather well defined and whether something is or isn't can be objectively "measured". Although I ofc dont know what _your personal_ definition for "properly decentralized" may be, its decentralized as in no single point of failure or control exists in the system. If you use another definition then it may or may not fit. But this is the most common simplified definition.
For a system that has to "decentralized" reach 80% agreement this means at least 3 independent entities are necessary to make it de-facto decentral. However, 2 colluding would break this already so obviously more than 3 is wanted. 3 would be the theoretical minimum. How many _you personally_ want to have to make it "properly decentralized" _for you_ isn't really a debatable topic, its an opinion. More is objectively better and less than 3 is objectively not decentral anymore.
The XRPL currently has about 30 _legally independent_ validator operators. There is no means to measure independents however. And no means to evaluate what would be needed to make 80% collude. BUT its important to know that colluding would not give them any financial benefit, in fact it would just stop the XRPL from working, which they all voluntary choose to support so that does not make much sense.
There is no double spending or the like possible if someone gains control over 80% of the validators. It could be turned off or they could push an amendment though that does whatever they want but its all public. No honest node can be tricked into breaking its own rules and add any kind of invalid transaction, reverse something or allow double spend. No amount of control can change the code that runs on the other validators. Assuming you dont trust anyone, you have to run your own node and then you can only be fooled if someone takes over your node at which point there is no way to prevent you from being fooled anyway.
If a collusion or take over would happen is would be a situation where a fork would be unavoidable and ofc wanted. Every honest participant would obviously choose the side that didn't push some amendment trough that somehow benefits someone. So there would be a fork with everyone who doesn't wanna play by the rules and the "main chain". This immediately renders the whole collusion useless as they have full control now but only on their own chain that no one cares about and are excluded from voting on the "main chain".
But overall its a purely theoretical scenario. There is no incentive to gain control if you cant do anything useful with it as the honest participants would just fork and exclude the compromised parties. Same if they would turn it off. It would just be a matter of time before the non-compromised parties ignore the offline ones so they can reach 80% consent again.
>(XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple])
That makes no sense
- XRP is the token in the XRP Ledger
- The XRPL is the whole system, the "blockchain", the DLT
- rippled is the name of the C++ implementation of the XRPL
- Ripple is a company that currently maintains the source code of XRPL reference implementation (rippled), which is open for anyone including for contribution. They are not controlling the XRPL. They are not controlling the code. Just like controlling the bitcoin GitHub repo does not control bitcoins code or the network.
Ripple also runs validators and in the early days they ran all of them so it was not decentralized according to the definition above. Over time more and more validators joined so Ripple no longer has any special power.
So far exactly 1 amendment was accepted with over 80% quorum without ripples positive votes. That means Ripple could not prevent that amendment from being enabled - they got overruled/over-voted.
Ripple also holds a lot of XRPs that however gives them no special rights or control over the XRPL. Most of these XRPs are in a time escrows.
Hope that clarifies some stuff you may have head. There is always XRPL.org for more in detail information. And like I said its not the only system that prevents unintentional forking.
It’s not too late, you can get back in, though you will have a tax bill. Maybe it can be a wash trade.
But if FUD that’s dishonest about bitcoin mining scared you off then you haven’t learned enough about bitcoin yet.
This us how bitcoin seeks the strongest hands. HFSP
While bitcoin is a record of transactions, and as such a database, it was not created to be a database.
Did you read the OP article?
But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea. First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.
Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate. But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate. Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate, but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.
Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like. If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.
Proof of Work is trustless decentralization.
Proof of stake is trusting the dudes who premined the coin and sold you a “fix for bitcoins inherent problem” to hype their ICO.
If you were right, after 10 years one of those PoS currencies would be winning. Can you even remember the proof of stake currencies from 2011?
Why did they fail? After all they had a huge economic advantage over bitcoin mining as they cost effectively zero electricity.
Can you answer that question?
FBA was "invented/discovered" before PoS coins even existed.
Essentially FBA is a distributed voting solution. Instead of let the person who has solved the PoW write the Tx in a block, everyone just votes on Tx order. The threshold is rather arbitrary. Most systems use something around 80%. In practice every valid Tx has near 100% votes anyway because no one listens to dishonest nodes. But nodes can go offline or Tx propagation can be delayed so a Tx could have only reached part of the network and thus not reach 100% Not a big deal even if a Tx has less than 80%. Nodes just re-vote for the Tx for the next round. Double spend is solved by the ordering alone. If one Tx is first the second that moves the same funds somewhere else, breaks a fundamental Tx rule so nodes wont vote to include the second. Which one came first is irrelevant. Each node just votes for the one he got first and in a possible second round it votes for what the majority of other nodes said came first. So the distributes system can not reach a state where a Tx is stuck.
This is all very very very much simplified ofc but you can easily lookup systems and dig into details if you are interested. There are real "blocklchains" running with FBA since many many years so it without any doubt works. Although like I said in my original post it can allays be improved.
People can have an argument about that, its fine but mine wasn't so you cant debunk it by telling me to read a book that seems 100% irrelevant.
PoW was simply used to solve the double spending problem in a decentral way. Which is exactly what FBA solutions do without it. Solving the double spending in a decentral way is the key "invention" of bitcoin NOT PoW. PoW existed way way before, it was just used to create the solution to the problem it was not invested/discovered for bitcoin nor was it the key element.
People came up with different solutions solving the same double spending problem in a decentral way but without using PoW. Some solutions are objectively better regardless of energy consumption and other secondary properties. They are objectively better because they scale to high throughput, allow short block times, have a proper and path forward to improve these properties over time with very limited "risk" of causing forks for every proposed change.
[0] Ouroboros - A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf
Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency. It was the first good one, though.
And arguably there's a much larger mob of people who haven't critically thought through any of Bitcoin - who own Bitcoin - but that are financially incentivized to promote Bitcoin or are biased to want Bitcoin to become something.
Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda.
Sure, yes. It would be valuable in the way that a barrel of oil is valuable. It has a number of practical uses in electronics, medicine, etc. Valuable as a currency or means of transferring wealth? Not as much. It's cumbersome for that role.
Bitcoin's value is not "coins". It is valuable for what it does (transfer wealth). It's a ledger, not really "coins".
Did you read the original article? It's actually worth the read if you didn't yet.
This comment of mine explains why I think Bitcoin is not a good form of money. Transferring wealth may be the most important function, but it's far from the only one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657
The article is certainly interesting. Unfortunately, the main source of inconsistencies with ledgers comes from human factors rather systemic ones. Fat finger errors, identity theft, credit card chargebacks, and fraud are all inconsistencies created by humans and can only be resolved through trusted centralized authorities.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir”
Comparing it to a bank with fiat a bank usually ensures the consistency of transactions so miners perform this action (and also developers of bitcoin if there are security holes) and your wallet is an account and bitcoin have a transaction cost which is like using a debit card associated with an account.
Graeber explains how money was created by states to enforce its authority and basically coerce people into participation. The anonymity of monetary debt and the fact that the system is controlled by the "powers that be" make it kind of the opposite of altruism.
Every time I read about Bitcoin here, I see the "Energy" arguments. Bitcoin was designed to solve a specific problem and it solves that. Even Satoshi himself would not have foreseen the energy requirements for PoW.
If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC. Technological advancements will always need energy. We should be discussing about how to efficiently harness that big fiery ball in space instead of shutting down technological advancements.
You speak of continuing to allow wasteful energy expenditures in analogy to going to the moon and building the LHC, but if we already know how to solve double-spending problem at lower energy costs, why should we allow bitcoin?
So I ask in good faith, what problem did bitcoin solve that nothing else has?
Blockchain will not automate any jobs because it is technologically no different from a database. The fact that transactions are recorded digitally is not a new invention, banks have been doing that since the 60s.
The need of not relying on a centralized entity or third parties in the digital space does exist.
EVERY transaction requires trust. I sell you a pair of shoes, you pay in bitcoin, oops! the box is actually full of cat poop, too bad, sucks to be you, you can't get your bitcoin back, shouldn't have trusted me.
Trust in the transaction system is not a dangerous component of commerce. Sure, you can trust Paypal to do the transaction for you (and also get benefits like chargebacks, disputes, and ID verification in return, not to mention the sub-second transaction speed), and what happens if they betray that trust? Well that's what governments are for, the two-ton hammer of the law will make sure you get your money back.
Not to mention, blockchain is the least trustworthy transaction system of the modern age. Over a billion dollars in crypto has been stolen out of people's accounts via exchange hacks and smart contract exploits in the last ten years. This has never happened to any US bank since the introduction of FDIC in 1933.
All in all it's all about the choice and preferences of individuals.
And why is that very minimal trust in the ability of your money to get from one account to another worth risking all your money by putting it in an account with a single point of failure with no recourse in the event of a breach?
In 88 years, no bank in the Untied States has ever lost a customer's money. To date, there are more bitcoin exchanges that have lost their users' money than there are that haven't.
The allegations in Choke Point were that banks were approving transactions they shouldn't have, without doing enough investigation to check for fraud, not that they were failing to move money from one account to another, the "problem" that blockchain is supposed to "solve".
In what way is blockchain supposed to prevent fraudulent transactions? It is impossible in blockchain to even check for fraud, because every transaction is automatically irrevocably approved by-design, no matter how fraudulent.
edit: unless, what you meant to imply, is that the banks weren't supposed to approve those illegal transactions and so the government stepped in to punish them, and that bitcoin is good because it will never deny an illegal transaction and is therefore useful for committing crimes? well then thanks for admitting it, I guess.
The trust Bitcoin removes is the central banking component. We rely on governments who have shown wanton disregard for the value of their respective dollars by printing limitless supplies and dancing with the risk of hyperinflation. When we save money in a given currency, it's because we trust that currency as a store of value or we park it in a vehicle that returns value or at least staves off depreciation of value (savings accounts, bonds, stocks etc.) Bitcoin allows you to park your savings in a space that does not require you to trust any particular government's monetary policy. Maybe you're entirely comfortable with the USD or the Euro but there are folks in less stable countries with which Bitcoin is a godsend.
What do you do if you're a billionaire in China and you said something bold online about an atrocity your government has just committed? You hear that you're about to be disappeared so you wish to defect to another country. How do you move your wealth? Can you move it via the existing banking digital network? No because the banking system is controlled by the government and that type of activity is red flagged and stopped. Can you move it all in cash or gold? Perhaps, but it's a huge undertaking logistically and very obviously shows your intentions.
Bitcoin allows you to relocate the entirety of your wealth anywhere in the globe with literally just your brain power. You can memorize your seed and leave to where ever you want. That is insanely powerful freedom which is the result of removing the "trusted" third party through decentralization.
As a developer I appreciate the ability to skip the use of a third party, I just wish there were more users in this network, but the network grows.
And this is not about the united states in particular. I'm not from the US, I'm glad if you didn't had any problems with your monetary system and banks, and I hope it continues for the good of everyone.
I think it's clear that the concept of a wallet or account that can be created at any time in almost any place almost instantly, that can send and receive something of value securely is a valuable contribution.
Right now it's not so bad, but the trajectory is a real problem.
This is not even close to true.
The energy requirements for the Saturn program and for the LHC were calculated and understood in precise detail, and did not depend on any assumption that there would be new energy sources in the future.
I am not trying to undermine Bitcoin's energy problem. We need more discussion and awareness on this than just labeling "Bitcoin bad" because it consumes more energy.
No amount of whataboutisms will offset the fact that Bitcoin's energy usage is additive on top of everything else. We don't get to choose between vampire device energy use or Bitcoin. We have to deal with both.
The very nature of Bitcoin incentivizes ever-increasing competition to spend more energy on mining. As long as the price continues to rise (as Bitcoin proponents hope) then the incentive to mine continues to rise.
Meanwhile, improving energy standards and improving power conversion technology continue to push energy consumption of vampire consumer devices down.
Can the energy problem be solved? I had like a discussion on that rather than "It's bad" arguments.
That’s not what it looked like when you made your comment about the LHC and the moon missions. Your position then was that we should not be arguing about the energy usage.
> If we had argued about energy requirements in late 60s we would have never reached Moon or built the LHC.
Now you are saying you would like such a discussion. This is a complete change in your position.
Are we expecting people not to change their position and make them feel guilty if they did? No wonder communities are more polarized than ever.
Edit: Besides if you read my original comment it already says
>We should be discussing about how to efficiently harness that big fiery ball in space instead of shutting down technological advancements.
Nobody is trying to make you feel guilty.
However, having earlier attempted to shut down the kind of discussion you now say you want, it’s not surprising people aren’t available to have that discussion with you now.
> No wonder communities are more polarized than ever.
I don’t see this as encouraging people to discuss solving the Bitcoin energy problem.
> We should be discussing about how to efficiently harness that big fiery ball in space instead of shutting down technological advancements.
Here it seems like you are making another attempt to close discussion of Bitcoin’s energy problem by saying we should be discussing solar energy instead.
This is probably part of why you got accused of whataboutism.
I am encouraging since beginning to have discussion other than "Bitcoin is bad because of its energy". I suggested Solar you could have come up with some thing else. But I don't see any suggestion from your end.
> It’s not surprising you aren’t getting it.
Projecting on me maybe?
> I don’t see this as encouraging people to discuss solving the Bitcoin energy problem.
I am just pointing out that it's the behavior like yours that encourages polarization. I don't see how that prevents people from discussing?
> This is probably part of why you got accused of whataboutism.
You don't read the full comments, do you? I actually thought you were making some sense when you pointed out the flaw in my argument in your first comment but now I think you just want to troll.
> Projecting on me maybe?
By ‘it’ I mean the discussion you say you want.
>> I don’t see this as encouraging people to discuss solving the Bitcoin energy problem.
> I am just pointing out that it's the behavior like yours that encourages polarization.
Is it?
> I don't see how that prevents people from discussing?
It doesn’t but when you accuse people of causing polarization, you discourage them from wanting to do so with you.
> This is probably part of why you got accused of whataboutism.
> You don't read the full comments, do you?
You don’t explain why you think this.
> I actually thought you were making some sense when you pointed out the flaw in my argument in your first comment but now I think you just want to troll.
I’m just pointing out that you didn’t act like someone who wanted to discuss the bitcoin energy problem, and so people aren’t likely to do so with you.
The fact that you changed your position isn’t enough for you to win back any trust on this, especially since you haven’t offered anything to the discussion except that.
My suggestion is that if you really want to discuss the energy problem, you try again later somewhere else, but this time:
1. start out by saying that, rather than the opposite.
2. Keep the focus on the energy problem with Bitcoin, rather than how to generate more energy.
That will help you to avoid being accused of whataboutism.
3. Avoid accusing people of trolling or ‘causing polarization’.
Try clicking on the time/age of my comment, you will probably get a reply box.
If bitcoin becomes a store of value / digital gold and people increasingly hold their wealth in Bitcoin countries will lose the ability control and regulate their own economy.
1) Why would any country hand over the reins of its economy to others ? India is already thinking of banning cryptocurrencies, China has similar thoughts too, if many large countries ban it how would Bitcoin sustain ?
2) US has fought wars to retain dollar as the global reserve currency. Why would the US give up this advantage ?
3) Presently, economic sanctions are used to push interests and disincentivize bad behavior. How would this play out in a world of Bitcoin ?
4) If bitcoin exists with fiat and exchange points can be controlled and blocked by governments, what's the point of Bitcoin ?
2. This is the same question as 1, isn’t it? Again, Bitcoin is people voting with their feet (so to speak) to take power away from governments.
3. Economic sanctions punish the common folk more than the evil governments. Bitcoin simultaneously takes power away from evil governments (see 1 and 2) and gives power to common folk.
4. I think you are alluding to one way governments can try to fight what is happening in 1, 2, and 3. If governments really try and crack down on exchanges, people will simply transact directly in Bitcoin. Those who have accumulated it pre-crackdown will purchase goods and services using Bitcoin, people who did not obtain any pre-crackdown and want it will offer goods and services to those who are offering Bitcoin.
In all honesty, these extreme scenarios are far fetched. Governments all ultimately get their authority from the people. If the people are choosing Bitcoin, the governments won’t fight it for long.
2) This is probably the best piece on that point: https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoi.... The summary is that unlike another country's currency, Bitcoin is significantly harder to attack.
3) Economic sanctions can still exist. You still have to pay your taxes even though many avoid them. What sanctions are you referring to specifically?
4) Look into the Lightning Network to see one among various ways Bitcoin is scaling outside of exchanges. It will continue to develop in interesting ways. In the meantime, governments that enable what a growing number of people want will be rewarded while those that attempt to ban it will suffer. The incentives to do so are not in their favor (also argued in the article above).
Not true, the US has been trying to reduce the usage of the USD as a reserve currency (it's the largest such currency but not the only one) due to it not having any real benefit to the US while exposing its economy to the effects of financial crises around the world.
---
Ben Bernanke (ex-FED Chairman) - The dollar’s international role: An “exorbitant privilege”?
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2016/01/07/the-d...
> A great deal of U.S. currency is held abroad, which amounts to an interest-free loan to the United States. However, the interest savings are probably on the order of $20 billion a year, a small fraction of a percent of U.S. GDP, and that “seigniorage,” as it is called, would probably still exist even if the dollar lost ground to other currencies...
> The safe haven aspect of the dollar is actually a negative for U.S. firms, since it implies that they become less competitive (the dollar is stronger) at precisely the times that global economic conditions are most difficult.
---
The ‘reserve currency’ myth: The US dollar’s current and future role in the world economy
https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/the-reserve-currency-myth-t...
> This safe-haven bid for US dollar assets means that the US dollar often behaves in ways that seem counter-intuitive relative to US economic fundamentals. As Figure 2 shows, the US dollar appreciates in response to economic policy uncertainty. A 1 per cent increase in the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index raises the real value of the US dollar by 0.2 per cent, controlling for relative interest rate, inflation and economic growth differentials with the rest of the world.
> The appreciation exacerbates trade tensions between the United States and the rest of the world by weighing on US export competitiveness, setting in train a protectionist spiral.
---
That the USD's role as a reserve currency isn't really very important doesn't change the fact that Bitcoin is a moderately interesting solution to a niche CS problem, and not the solution to financial problems nobody actually has, either because they were solved decades or centuries ago, or because they're not and never were real problems in the first place.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a math nerd. I think bitcoin is fascinating as a technical achievement, and hope we keep exploring the blockchain idea. However, I also know that bitcoin mania has literally affected global supply chains of computer components and inflicted a measurable exacerbation of global warming. There is a colourable argument about whether bitcoins have value, but it's very clear that bitcoin has a non-trivial cost.
Right now, Bitcoin’s primary economic role seems to be as a demonstration of just how many Greater Fools the internet and social media give us access to.
Most people want security in their assets, which is why a majority of folks read articles about bitcoin but never touch one.
All of these articles are great examples of creative writing. I do kind of enjoy them.
It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoptio...
Bitcoin is essentially a proxy for another currency. Mostly the USD. These people need a way to protect their assets from what their own governments are doing to the value of their native currencies.
They cannot buy securities or foreign currencies for various reasons.
Bitcoin gives them a way. A way to convert their native currencies into USD, a stronger currency.
So while it's a good use-case for Bitcoin, it's not exactly a situation that's applicable to the world at large.
Yes, but this is only temporarily. It's like refactoring systems. You create a new system and a proxy and then have the old system communicate with the new one via the proxy (or vice versa). Eventually, the old system becomes obsolete, so you kill it and get rid of the proxy.
In your example, Bitcoin would obviously be the "old system" if everyone wanted to use it for moving money around, because there are plenty of more advanced alternatives that work far better.
So why is Bitcoin so popular? Because it's a speculative investment. A new asset class divorced from fundamentals, making it impossible to say when the value is too high. That's why people like it.
Most people use Bitcoin via exchanges, where they keep the coins. The average crypto user from Nigeria has zero interest in paying $10+ transaction fees every time they need to do anything with their money.
At this point, it doesn't matter if they own BTC or ETH or DOGE or whatever. They just want whatever allows them to move money around. The exchanges could simply keep balances in a database and reconcile them amongst each other via contracts, and it wouldn't make any difference as far as the end users are concerned (There are examples of this happening between exchanges).
Maybe it's a "less terrible" solution in poor countries with inflation challenges, but I don't see that as a strong proposition for the utility of bitcoin. Cigarettes are used as a medium of exchange in prison. That doesn't serve as a strong argument for using cigarettes as currency.
There are long phases in BTC's history where 100% of holders are in very handsome profits. And that's the problem?
If you're just making long speculative investments in btc and volatility is skewed to the upside, well sure that's fine but you're not using bitcoin as a medium of exchange, you're investing in it as a security.
Do we? Or have we lived in a world where asset prices were suppressed due to artificial intervention by central banks.
Interest rate setting is a market intervention. If left to its own devices the market rate would be driven down towards zero.
How do you figure?
Since there are always more reserves than required, and no alternative source of interest, the inter bank rate would be driven to zero by supply and demand. That's then the 'market rate'.
You can't hold reserves so the bank can charge you extra for borrowing money. Only banks can get zero.
How do you think central bank rates bind? It gives banks an alternative source of interest other than lending them to each other.
I interpret the phrase 'left to their own devices' to mean that there is no central bank and therefore reserves are as a concept are null and void, which then also nullify the concept of a federal funds rate, which would upend the concept of the federal funds rate being 'the market rate' in the first place.
I'll take your word for it about the mechanics of what happens to inter-bank rates under different reserve mechanisms, perhaps they would be driven to zero for the reasons you outlined.
However I'm unclear on what the macroeconomic ramifications would be of letting a small group of banks dictate the federal funds rate; I believe the purpose of this system is to achieve a congressional directive regarding price stability and labor utilization.
Banks can't get rid of reserves at the central bank in aggregate. They can only get rid of them to other banks. So there is no need for the central bank to pay them.
You can't hold reserves so the bank can charge you for borrowing money.
Since there are more reserves than required, and no alternative source of interest, the inter bank rate would be driven to zero.
How do you think central bank rates bind? It gives banks an alternative source of interest other than lending them to each other.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Bank reserves aren't an important factor in the financial systems, they're there to ensure customers have access to money if they want to withdraw it and to allow banks to move money between each other. More importantly banks don't lend money out of their reserves (so-called "fractional reserve banking"), they simply add the loan amount to the customer's account and also to their own liabilities i.e. they "create" money.
Out of all cryptocurrencies that exist today, Bitcoin is probably the worst one for buying drugs online. It's pseudo-anonymous at best (compared to Zcash that is actually anonymous), slower than many others and if government agencies have tracking tools in the cryptocurrency space, Bitcoin is probably the most popular target for those tools.
Monero/XMR is the only 100% private, fungible cryptocurrency. All transactions enforced private by default, with no option to send an un-private transaction.
hint: posts mostly consist of "<famous guy> tweeted about <my favourite shitcoin>, this is good for the price of <my favourite shitcoin>".
Bitcoin can be thought of as a clock, but the unit that is being transfered can't be thought as time because for it to be mappable to time, you need a linear function and Bitcoin's emission is exponential because of the halvings.
[1] https://medium.com/amberdata/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-nev...
P.S. I prefer thinking of a blockchain as a "drunk" clock, because of the variance that comes with the finding of a valid PoW. It might sway a bit left and right, but it mostly goes in the straight line in the end.
Doesn't the consistent emission of Grin depend upon the number of users and transactions also rising at the same consistent rate? Can we really count on that like we can count on the ticking of time?
Compared with gold, yes you can estimate when new gold is unearthed, but at the same time, there is a theoretical limit to the total amount of gold in the ground, right?
The effect of adding one coin to a pool of coins, on a steady schedule, results in inflation along a logarithmic curve. Inflation is about how much money is created relative to how much exists, so the second minute of Grin is 100% inflation, the third minute is 66%, and so on.
Also, people lose their cybercoins. It might average out that Grin hits a steady state, or even deflates a bit, depending on how frequently people or corporations lose their keys, die without heirs, send to a nonexistent address, and so on.
But even without this, the mining reward remains consistent even as overall inflation becomes negligible. Inflation never stops, but it does hit a point where it may as well have.
Bitcoin, by contrast, is guaranteed to be deflationary, and in fact the property that everyone holding BTC gets a permanent bump in asset value every time a bit of the ledger is lost strikes me as... moderately hazardous to the health of those who hold large allocations of the ledger.
I don't think this has much bearing on the article though, just wanted to tip the hat to another Grin respecter.
It was founded by ETH co-founder Charles, who formed an academia network of CS PhD researchers to deal with 3rd gen blockchain problems and solutions.
It is 3rd gen blockchain built to handle the problems of ethereum and other blockchains that came prior.
https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437
Combining GHOST and Casper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03052
A very simple summary is that it's a fairly traditional consensus protocol, in which if anyone breaks the rules it's possible to prove who did it and penalize them by burning their stake. It achieves scale by using aggregated signatures.
The recent thread about Nyan Cat's NFT sale is an indicator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027
From the comments: "The comments in this thread resemble comments dismissing BTC in 2011/2012"
Welp, you were right!
== Traditional currency ==
- needs central authority
+ energy efficient
== Bitcoin ==
+ doesn't need central authority
- energy intensive
If there already is a central authority you can trust, it doesn't make sense to go through the song and dance of having a trustless currency system designed to work under adversarial conditions. Bitcoin isn't on the cusp of taking over the world, it fulfills a specific niche.
Bitcoin proponents are becoming more and more insane.
Don't give them too much credit. The notion of time in distributed systems has been defined "insanely" since at least 1978[0].
But you can't prove that something has happened BEFORE a particular event using Bitcoin hashes.
Also, this "feature" is unrelated to Bitcoin being a cryptocurrency. You can have cryptocurrencies without "global time" (e.g. NANO).
Anyway, any other "linear" blockchain (e.g. with PoS consensus) can do the same work. No wasting of resources is needed.
OP pretty much explains the intuition behind why history as a sequence of events in a blockchain works, but Bitcoin PoW is different from PoH as maintaining order is the main work done and not a side-effect.
1. https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-...
every post including cryptocoin here gets a generic comment like yours about some other cryptocoin that is 'very promising'
I follow alternative consensus algorithms and trustless decentralized app tech in the blockchain space because I think it is interesting and democratizing tech. I do not own half of the coins I follow and couldn't care less for speculation. Technologically, cryptocurrency is still an exiting domain and scepticism is in place, but the blind hate for anything blockchain on HN is a bit OTT.
"valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks".
Half of the comments on this page complain about how Bitcoin uses too much energy and how PoW is wasteful. This is a direct (allegedly, if what they write is correct) solution to exactly that.
Did you understand me? Then the spelling was good enough. Please don't attempt to derail with gender role trolling.
I probably understood even more than you were willing to share: your level of knowledge about this topic.
> gender role trolling
What does gender has to do with anything? You brough it up, not me. Also where did I "troll" you? The word "housewife"? Not sure why you would take offence in that, for me it is not a negative or lower-value term, it simply refers to a person that has chosen and has had the possibility and privilege to spend most of their time at home taking care of their family. I could just as easily have used "hairdresser" or "bricklayer", those people have equally likely little to do with crypto and have the same level of knowledge about bitcoin that you seem (assuming by that spelling, in which I could be wrong of course) to have. That's why I wonder, where did you pick that up? That spelling? Nobody in the industry spells it that way, that's all.
how many people would buy it (or even care about it) if they were gauranteed 100% that it would never increase in price? None. this proves its purely a speculative asset with the hope to dump the bags on some other greater fool. if there was some legitimate use then the focus would all be on stablecoins or people would love bitcoin even if it went down in value.
It's been a few years since I was reading in-depth about Bitcoin, and I don't have references, but off the top of my head:
* It's bad for the environment, "wasting" so much electricity on more and more literal busywork... or is it? Apparently it depends where your electricity is coming from (it had better be cheap if you want to make money mining!) and whether you are actually causing additional electricity to be generated or just consuming surplus, or so I've heard.
* Control and power over Bitcoin is not all that distributed in practice. Mining a block would take prohibitively long for an individual, so there are mining pools where participants share in the spoils. Mining pools and exchanges have a lot of power. Just as the infrastructure of the Internet is run by big telecommunications companies whose routers talk to each other, there are various major players that make Bitcoin run, and there are occasionally decisions affecting the future and fate of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin politics, like disputes over protocols.
* In theory, Bitcoin is hard to fraudulently "take over" because you'd have to have more computing power than the rest of the miners combined, but if you control mining pools, or are China or something, I believe you could do it (and no one would necessarily know?).
* The rise of Bitcoin as a currency (not just a ledger/clock) whose value seems to just go up and up raises a lot of questions (IMO) about whether this is a good property of a distributed ledger system.
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
All things equal, BTC has a limited supply, making it unusable as a currency (but great as a deflationary store of value). I suppose the definition of "money" is less specific than "currency," but this notion of "money" goes contrary to the nomenclature of the human realm. Yes, technically anything that is tradable is "money," but then the term becomes rather meaningless.
Money must be backed by a creative asset, such as an orchard or labor or technology. Time alone a currency does not make.
BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency. Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue?
Bitcoin is backed by proof of work. Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money. I really suggest thinking about this for a lot longer.
BTC in particular has long transaction verification times that are growing longer.
>Can you give an example where its capped supply would cause an issue?
To be useful as a day-to-day currency there needs to be a balance between inflation and value.
Currency works best when people are not encouraged to hoard it, because then the economic incentive of using money is there.
If I hold on to a dollar, in <30 years it will have about half that spending power at current inflationary momentum. Thus, it is more prudent to spend the currency on assets or exchange them for necessities. If the currency itself increases in value as time goes on, the incentive to exchange it for goods and services is actually not there.
Currency comes from the word current meaning flow. Hoarding something is the opposite of letting things flow.
>BTC is infinitely divisible, and so can be used as currency.
BTC is not "infinitely divisible." There is a smallest unit of BTC known as a satoshi, and transaction fees (the amount you must include to incentivize miners to actually put your transaction into a block) is already greater than the amount of BTC stored in some addresses.
>Money backed by entities are liabilities, which is a bug and not a feature of fiat money.
It may be the case that there are unsavory entities between the creative asset and the actual printed bill, but currency is at its basis rooted in the creative yield of branch or brain.
Bitcoin is still in its infancy phase tackling problem (1). (2) Will come once enough people value it to accept it as money, which hasn't happened yet. (3) is further still.
You claim we should buy goods and services because otherwise our hard-spent time will disappear.
I claim this is not the natural order of things, only what inflationists want you to believe to justify what is a unilateral tax and re-distribution of wealth (similar to the dilution that occurs in fund-raising). In a free market, we should buy these things because we need them and want them enough to exchange our hard-earned money for them, not because of the fear that our previous work/stored energy is slipping away.
The things you wouldn't buy would be things you wouldn't need. Perhaps we can return to a state where we don't spend money we don't have on status symbols and asset-hoarding. That, plus funding wars, are among the results of putting money supply in government hands. Bitcoin actually provides a way out of this mess.
> BTC is not "infinitely divisible."
If it were to become significantly more valuable, sub-Satoshi denominations will be added.
Thus, it seems like the mechanism which keeps bitcoin running is something similar to the sunk cost fallacy or framed differently attachment to a state of the ledger that is perceived as favorable by the invested community. I hope that people will realize soon enough that bitcoin should probably more be treated like a nice art project - not more, not less.
https://allenfarrington.medium.com/bitcoin-is-venice-8414dda...
Bitcoin is a Venice, time, a Ponzi scheme, a climate disaster, digital gold, dead (x400), criminal, a bubble...
The half-baked hot takes that reach the frontpage of HN are getting better and better.
I think there will be a low power processor that can perform unique instructions that are expensive to simulate on CPUs and GPUs, but is amenable to hashing, and is not too expensive to buy. My guess is something neuromorphic.
The first mWpowcoin could then be born.
I do see a downside that people will have to buy a special chip that has little general utility, but from the rise of ASICs that must be ok.
I know proof of stake exists, but clearly it isn't as popular. People like mining?
If I might chip in with my freshly minted 1 karma account.. Bitcoin/"Satoshi" was an incubator of sorts. It brought the brightest minds together to build a new internet that is resistant to tampering by your neighbour or the government. It will in due time make way for the rising stars in that sector (IOHK I'm looking at you!) that will incrementally work toward perfect balance, until it itself is superseded some day.
The article made thing an interesting point regarding how information cannot be "moved" itself but only copied and then the previous copy destroyed.
I think RIAA, MPAA and other virtual goods creators could benefit from the non-fungible tokens things that are just raising as a use of the blockchain.
Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.
You can infinitely copy information. It's in the article.
What you are proposing is profoundly silly. But to understand why it's profoundly silly is very much worthwhile!
http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...
In fact, who is selling bitcoin? Only those that don't believe it won't be an upgrade to base-layer money. Those that would call themselves bitcoiners don't want to sell it. I've never heard of a Ponzi where some people just won't sell!
This page is an embarrassing collection of misinformation.
Every time somebody does a transaction involving bitcoins mined from a long time ago the entire ledger is need it to see the origins of those bitcoins.
Bitcoin is 12 years old now, and it's 320 GB. I could store 2 full copies of it on what's left of my 2TB laptop SSD.
In another 12 years, that is in 2033, it will be 640 GB. I'm pretty sure I'll have more than 2TB in my laptop by then; and I could fit one copy of that future blockchain on my SSD right now.
Or to put it slightly differently, I can fit the whole BTC chain on a $20 USB stick.
They can’t all be negative in real terms.
Nah. It motivates rational beings to spend that capital on anything at all, as fast as possible, because the alternative is a net loss of purchasing power.
Deflationary currencies on the contrary motivate actors to think before spending, because any spending has to be balanced with the future gains that won't come from holding it and seing it accumulate value over time.
Yet fiat enthusiasts keep parroting that the linear and intentional destruction of value through inflation, in order to encourage further mindless consumption, is a good thing? What is so bad about a currency that maintains its value throughout time? This would allow someone to actually save, rather than be forced to buy some stupid widget they don't need, or become a part-time fund manager trying to decide between a series of risky assets. As it stands, simple savings accounts pay zero and lose money to inflation, so if you don't become a one-man hedge fund or pay someone else to become one for you, you just lose your money.
Why would you think that Bitcoin needs to accomplish that particular task? As far as I know ending climate change has never been mentioned as a goal or desirable outcome of the project.
Ethereum is at least working hard on other algorithms that are energy efficient. But in the Bitcoin space, the tremendous investment in energy-intensive mining equipment means that the entrenched players have an interest in persisting the way that things currently work, rather than seeking an energy conserving replacement.
This silly task (called HashCash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash ) was chosen not because those numbers are somehow important to the algorithm or network, but rather as a way to slow down the rate of block creation: forcing people to waste energy on finding these numbers, in order to have their blocks accepted by the network.
It is important for bitcoin's security that the block chain can only grow slowly, since conflicts (like double-spending) are resolved by choosing the longest chain; if someone makes their own block chain that's longer than the main bitcoin chain, the network will switch to that and any payments on the previous chain will be forgotten. Using HashCash to slow down block creation makes this harder to pull off.
The difficulty of the HashCash task (the required number of zeros for the next block's hash) changes depending on how long it took to find the last block, such that it always takes about 10 minutes to find a block, regardless of how much energy is spent on this task, or any technology improvements (e.g. CPU vs GPU vs ASIC). In other words, wasting more energy on mining bitcoin, or making more efficient bitcoin mining hardware, will not find blocks any faster; the mining task will become harder to compensate, so it still takes about 10 minutes per block.
Bitcoin allows transactions to contain a 'fee' with a blank recipient, and each block can also contain a small payment 'from nowhere' as a reward/incentive. Miners create blocks which send these fees and rewards to themselves, then try to solve the HashCash task to make the block valid. Whoever solves it first sends their block to the network, it gets accepted as the longest chain, and hence that miner has received the fees and reward.
Miners can't make more money by solving HashCash faster, since it always takes about 10 minutes for a block's HashCash to be solved, at which point everyone starts looking for a following block (since that will form the longest chain), which may be even harder to find. Instead, wasting more energy on mining makes it more likely that a miner will be the one who finds the next block; since, on average, someone performing X% of all mining will find X% of all new blocks (and hence receive X% of the fees and rewards).
This creates a competition between miners, to try and waste more energy on HashCash than each other. This race-to-the-bottom breaks even when the energy wasted finding a block costs the same as all of the fees and rewards in that block; i.e. when all of those wasted megawatts are being spent for literally nothing (net).
There are other ways to slow down the creation of blocks, or to resolve conflicts which don't incentivise long chains; other cryptocurrencies are experimenting with such things.
In a way I appreciate bitcoin for its absurd and unambiguous wastefulness. It's sort of the perfect expression of consumerism, destroying the precious and irreplaceable earth for something immediately disposed of.
Energy consumption != energy production. Bitcoin is incentivizing reusable energy and moving energy to cheaper locations, further from cities. I suggest you look into how it's actually quite positive for the Earth.
We also know that this theory is really, really stupid: The kind of self-justifying idiocy that people don't come up with unless they're already deeply committed to a point of view come what may, logic and fact need not apply.
I was going to add a disclaimer to my post along the lines of "not saying I believe or disbelieve this theory", but I was tired of adding disclaimers to all my posts.
> Are you really going to claim that there isn't a demand for green energy already?
Is a disingenuous argument. Of course there is already demand for green energy. Meanwhile, Bitcoin increases the demand so much that people are apparently outraged by the increase.
Assuming that you think you're serious: Increasing the demand for energy (and it's not "demand for green energy" it's demand for energy, period) is not, has not been and never will be a green strategy in itself.
This is easy to understand, unless you choose not to.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/03/guest-post-t...
1. Wind/solar energy are being trumpeted around the world as the cheapest source of electricity available. 2. Bitcoin miners' profits are directly `sale price of BTC - buy price of electricity`. Other costs are marginal in comparison. 3. BTC mining is a extremely competitive, trivially mobile, trivially liquid, global market. 4. Given 1, 2 & 3 there is a lot of fretting that BTC is creating a coal-powered financial system.
With the recent spike, the currently reasonable cost for a fast, median-sized transaction is $10.46 [1] [2] According to the fretting articles I read, that is enough to power an average home for a 23 days and motivates sending over 300kg (700lb) of C02 into the air [3] That's 35 gallons of gasoline at 20lb CO2/gallon.
:/
For what it's worth, I get the concern. But, I also see equal shares of BTC hate|BTC fanboyism everywhere I go. Latching on to the environmental concerns of BTC is trendy right now. It's hard to argue against without sounding like an asshole and it's not entirely false. But, it's not entirely honest either. Everything I read and calculate shows that BTC makes total sense as a defacto green energy subsidy. But, that does not spark outrage. So, instead there is a lot of fretting about the second rise of a coal-powered economy.
IMHO, the way Ethereum is going is great: Bootstrap with POW then switch to POS after enough investment is built-up that staking actually means something. It's arguable that the best use of BTC at this point is to burn them all to bootstrap more POS tokens. We just need alternatives that inspire enough confidence to motivate people to convert their BTC over.
[1] https://awebanalysis.com/en/convert-satoshi-to-dollar-usd/ [2] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [3] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
Then you must be reading in a bubble, as this is nonsense. Self-justifying fantasising.
Throwing energy away (which from an outside POV, this is merely an example of) is not and never has been a green energy strategy. I mean that very literally: the green people are very keen on electricity demand reduction, always have been, and are not going to change this. Because they're not wrong.
Key terms to google: Energy conservation, Energy Efficiency, energy demand reduction, Negawatt
You can have everyone work hard to reduce their energy usage. You can have tax-funded subsidies to motivate green supply increase despite targeting reduced demand. And, that's all lovely and great.
At the same time, you can have a voracious, highly mobile demand for the cheapest energy around. You know, the kind that solar and wind is supplying, but sometimes in mildly inconvenient locations. This does not actually reduce the supply for everyone else. It's not a zero-sum game. Supply follows demand. This horrendous cadre of buyers directly pay for increased production of cheap green energy that otherwise would not have been set up at all. Thus, ramping up equipment production and economy of scale. And, motivating the creation of supply that otherwise would have been too risky to invest in.
It makes no sense to talk about something being limited "right now". Limits are about the future.
Can you please rephrase and clarify?
- a lot of it is spare power that would be wasted otherwise (only partially true).
- it uses less energy overall than governments spend protecting their fiat money's value (not that comparable since fiat can also be used as currency).
- the gold industry uses a lot of energy too (but I doubt Bitcoin will reduce the energy spent on gold, it will probably just add up).
EDIT: completed gold mining point following comment
I'm not sure it will add up. It seems to me that different stores of value compete directly with each other, because you can store value one way or the other way.
Why do people keep making the comparison to gold mining? It's inappropriate.
Gold mining is bad for the value of gold, because it increases the amount of gold in the world. Eventually, the gold coffers on Earth will deplete and there will be no more gold mining.
Bitcoin mining is necessary for the value of bitcoin, otherwise there can be no certainty of the blockchain. After most of the bitcoins get minted, the mining will still have to continue out of transaction fees.
The cost of mining bitcoin needs to be compared to the cost of gold storage and handling of gold transactions, not gold mining.
A lot of us could live a more simple life (i.e. no cars, fewer children). But humans are attracted to comfort and the ability to pursue their dreams.
It's fiat currency combined with total energy crisis. It only retains value as long as people are willing to tolerate exponential destruction of resources by the already wealthy who can afford to bankroll any possible conversion of energy directly into 'money', no matter what workaround is required.
If it becomes 'the miners run for one second every day' and there is no way to cheat, these are the people who simply take the same amount of energy they were draining before, and come up with a way to store it the whole day… that or the world blacks out every day, because miners.
Bottom line is unless they get everything they want and dream of, including the eradication of government currency, the escalation will inevitably lead to a collapse where all the work becomes meaningless, valueless. All that energy will have been burned for NOTHING.
We just don't know when that will happen. Bitcoin is time, all right: time running out. Don't be caught still holding it when it pops.
On the other hand, the finite supply/deflationary aspect of it is also the perfect antithesis of consumerism, in that it favors hoarding (spending less) instead of spending your paycheck as you get it.
The way I see it, it's either "burn" the energy in proof of work (the machines leave behind only heat and bitcoin) or let a closed institution take this energy to provide this trust.
In the end, it's all tradeoffs and incentives decided by politics and made possible by technologies.
If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, picking random numbers and doing math on them in the hope of striking lucky and discovering the next block. The mining difficult is artificially picked so that blocks are discovered about every ten minutes.
However, imagine if bitcoin miners could all declare a cease-fire, for 9m59s of those ten minutes, i.e. they just do nothing for that long, consuming virtually no energy, and then they all furiously mine at full speed for the last second (with the difficulty adjusted so the global mining should take a second). This process would be just as fair as the current one; if you have more/faster hardware, you will still mine more, in the same proportion as before. The total energy usage would be reduced 600-fold!
But - the reason you can't do this is that there's no way of stopping cheating. Who can tell if the other miners are really idling for those 9:59? This is where the time source comes in. Imagine you have a trusted time source: it could, every ten minutes, broadcast a random number. Miners would have to listen for this number, then mine a block containing it, to prove that they didn't start work early. Problem solved!
Back to the real world: just about everyone can agree on time; we have NTP and can even use certificates to authenticate clock sources, we can even use multiple sources to make it harder for time to be faked. So why can't blockchains do the same thing? Why don't they use multiple time oracles to stop the colossal energy wastage?
And, when bitcoiners tell you that relying on a centralised source, or even a quorum of sources, is completely unacceptable, why then are the same people happy to use smart contracts where the use of centralised oracles is apparently both acceptable and commonplace?
It wouldn't. If X$ worth of bitcoin is handed out every block, then miners competing for that prize are willing to collectively spend up to X$ per block on average.
If they could only mine for part of the time, then they'd simply acquire more hardware and mine at a higher hashrate during the shorter time.
My example is also missing the obvious next step though - once you are using a trusted source of data (or even a wide selection of trusted sources), the whole blockchain idea becomes pointless, you don't need to do any mining at all, you can let the trusted sources run a distributed database...
It's reasonably straightforward to build systems under such constraints; e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_programming
This just isn’t true. Only a vanishingly small fraction of these people has ever touched smart contracts.
https://solana.com/solana-whitepaper.pdf
The core insight, I think, is this:
> Proof of History is a sequence of computation that can provide a way to cryptographically verify passage of time between two events. It uses a cryp- tographically secure function written so that output cannot be predicted from the input, and must be completely executed to generate the output. The function is run in a sequence on a single core, its previous output as the current input, periodically recording the current output, and how many times its been called. The output can then be re-computed and verified by external computers in parallel by checking each sequence segment on a separate core. Data can be timestamped into this sequence by appending the data (or a hash of some data) into the state of the function. The recording of the state, index and data as it was appended into the sequences provides a timestamp that can guarantee that the data was created sometime before the next hash was generated in the sequence. This design also supports horizontal scaling as multiple generators can synchronize amongst each other by mixing their state into each others sequences. Horizontal scaling is discussed in depth in Section 4.4
I think you're largely describing two separate camps within bitcoin hodlers. Some are 'gold-bug' types that value security and individual liberty above all else, and so are very conservative in their attitude towards Bitcoin development. Others are 'cyberpunk' types that value technological capability and functionality, and are much more liberal and exploratory in what they'd like to see Bitcoin become.
When you say "same people", I think they are rare, and this statement makes a bit of a false lack-of-dichotomy.
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 be provided commensurately to society for the damage incurred. And yet:
2. It is a terrible currency. Promoters claimed we could pay for things with Bitcoin, that it'd replace fiat currency. But the design of Bitcoin in particular makes it an awful currency. To prevent deflation, a currency should be able to increase its supply to maintain reasonably constant velocity as demand increases for it as a medium of exchange. With its limited number of coins, Bitcoin cannot increase supply to maintain velocity: its only solution is to fractionalize, a form of deflation. And deflation is what we get. Massively: everything you own, and all your income, constantly becomes worth less expressed in Bitcoin, day after day.
3. It's a terrible currency, part two: currencies should have very low transaction costs. Bitcoin transaction costs exceed $20. The response to this is to recentralize it in the form of services that cheaply transact Bitcoin rights management through traditional databases. Eliminating the very value proposition of Bitcoin.
4. After having given up on defending it as a currency, the next claim is that it's a "store of value." But stores of value should have some degree of consistency of value: volatility is not a virtue. Bitcoin supporters are right that fiat currency, to the degree it is exposed to inflation, is at risk of not being the best store of value, which is why we don't normally keep huge amounts of resources piled up as cash. But Bitcoin is an awful store of value because it has no fundamental utility that moderates its price swings. Normal assets - real estate, bonds, gold - have some sort of fundamental utility or cash flow that helps to moderate price action over time. The asset must have some sort of use first, then it can become a good store of value. Because of the above flaws, Bitcoin has no good use, which thusly makes it a poor store of value.
None of this is a fundamental problem of crypto, just Bitcoin. Crypto could be very useful! But with many millionaires minted from a lucky speculation and their entire ego reliant on deceiving themselves that their speculation was clairvoyance, critiques of Bitcoin are invariably met with a flea market of intellectually mangy defenses that ultimately boil down to saying "well, look at its price!"
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 large portion of renewable energy sources, and will continue to balance it's energy use towards efficiency and optimizations.
Your part 2/3 etc, it's not a currency. Bitcoin is pure money. We also do not really ever use gold for currency. It is money. Bitcoin is a better money than gold. Once you stop drumming on the wrong path, you'll more easily understand the differences and stop banging your head about how it's a bad currency. It's not a great currency, while it is the very best form of money.
Your whole bit about meandering into defending it's value as currency or store of value, is just highlighting your total misunderstanding of the value of gold, or the new digital version of gold as money. Money IS a store of value.
Lastly, Bitcoin really has no fundamental problems. Nobody that knows about bitcoin gives a flying fuck about the price.
But it's cute. You like Bitcoin. You're a good cheerleader.
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.
Furthermore, there are not "blockchains," there is one blockchain, and then there are a thousand or more scams trying ride Bitcoin's shoulders. They are entirely pointless systems that are not made to solve anything, they don't solve anything, and they were not made by mathematicians or cryptographers.
The majority of the hash rate is produced in the USA
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. The ones who understand binary and the ones that do not.
You can obviously replace binary with bitcoin :). The ones who do not get bitcoin, will continue to not get bitcoin.
I'll be laughing at your comment in 5 years time once a single Bitcoin will be valued above $1M USD while your fiat currency savings will have lost at least 50% of its current purchase power.
Screenshot this.
Sheer wasted electricity.
"Mining wastes electricity" is a trite talking point we will see in every discussion.
---
Some of the entropy stuff seems a bit confused.
As time goes on, Bitcoin's blockchain's entropy is decreasing, not increasing. The [genesis-block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block) is like a [nucleation-seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal), and the blockchain's growing from that genesis-block like ice crystallizing from a nucleation-seed as the surrounding water freezes.
The second-law-of-thermodynamics asserts that entropy tends to increase in the overall system, in a cumulative sense, but not necessarily throughout the entire system. Bitcoin's blockchain's removed entropy tends to imply an increase of entropy in the surrounding environment (leading to the environmental concerns with its energy-consumption).
If Bitcoin's mining-difficulty were reduced and the miner-pool shrunk a lot, then Bitcoin's blockchain would have less entropy removed, but the environment would have less entropy added to it as Bitcoin's power-consumption would be less.
This is by-design. For example, if you want a secure password, then you want it to have [high entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a...), because then it's harder for an attacker to guess your password. Bitcoin's the same way, except that it doesn't start knowing the password -- instead, Bitcoin asserts that whoever controls the most entropy-removing-power (mining power) is the correct authority. So that's why [Bitcoin sets a high-enough difficulty](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty): it needs a high-enough difficulty to prevent someone from easily [faking a longer blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack).
Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons:
- emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3.
- energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina.
- transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising.
There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators.
This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor...
I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.
I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?
it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. So it is still expensive to send arbitrary transactions, it is just now relatively cheap to do "banking" with a single entity.
That entity sending money for you may still be expensive as well. If they have another entity who they do roughly equal amounts of transactions and withdrawals from then yes, they can nominally transact that for free, but they will still probably charge you for the service, and having that bank send a payment to an arbitrary user with whom they don't have balanced deposits/withdrawals incurs the normal bitcoin transaction fee. You can see where all of this is going - Lightning doesn't really solve anything, it still is only optimized for transactions between large, centralized entities.
Oh, and if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved, then reopened if you want to do further business. So you have to pay a transaction fee every time you lose internet (or there is a routing problem somewhere on the net) or power.
Channel factories will significantly reduce the need to go to the blockchain to open and close channels.
> if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved
This is complete non-sense, your channel lives on as long as you don't close it, if you're concerned about counterparty risk, you can use a watchtower.
I don't get how you go from there to "centralised banking". Contrary to a bank, you do not need to trust this entity with your money. Also it is not centralised, there can be many such entity and they connect together.
After running it for 6 months, I could certainly criticise various aspects of lnd but none of what you have written falls into the valid criticism category.
I use https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz, easy to assemble and install and runs silently in a corner.
> getting it connected to a larger network?
Connecting to others is simple. What's more difficult is getting inbound connections, ie. others connecting to you. Historically you asked people to connect to you but recently you have https://pool.lightning.engineering/ (integrated into Raspiblitz) with which you can buy incoming connections easily.
> do you make any money from lighting fees?
In short no. I made ~$30 from routing fees in 6 months and spent around the same on on-chain fees (opening/closing channels). It's just an experiment for me (same with bitcoin itself) to see how it all works not something i expect to generate money.
> they [the central banks] can expand the money supply to keep the system propped up.
They have to expand money supply to keep the value of the currencies stable as long as most money is not spent. The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money.
By which force do central banks have to keep increasing the money supply once people start spending? There is no reason to do so and thus no reason for fiat currencies to collapse.
It's more likely that they increase interest rates when people start spending again, and thus reduce supply and as a consequence, keep the value of money stable.
The supply of money is adjusted to match how much is needed, it's the entire reason why countries switched to fiat currencies. Everything else being equal, if the GDP is growing 5% each year you need 5% more money each year to keep the same velocity of money i.e. how much is being used in the economy.
If a 51% attack was actually lucrative then shouldn't at least some miners attempt it given that BTC hash-power is about 100X that of BCH?
100 maximum transactions per second is still orders of magnitude too low to be useful on a daily basis outside of niche uses (read: drugs). Ten minutes confirmation time is still orders of magnitude worse than credit cards or cash.
Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV.
This is sarcasm right?
China is the only country pushing that kind of hash rate at the moment, so we should analyze whether the move would be beneficial to them in order to determine the risk.
The real problem is that if it happens once, it's proven to be both possible and practical. And once it's proven to be possible and practical, how do you know it won't happen again and again?
> What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security?
Most mining hardware is specific to hashing, not Bitcoin specifically.
The obvious attack is something like this: Imagine someone invents a Bitcoin competitor that is somehow more resistant to these types of attacks, yet can use the same mining hardware. To convince everyone to switch to their new alternative (which they have accumulated significant amounts of, similar to Satoshi), they spend the money to crash Bitcoin, while advertising themselves as the more secure alternative to Bitcoin.
The better argument here is that 98% of cryptocurrencies are very cheap to 51% attack, and they are attacked successfully. One would expect these to be exploited aggressively before a successful Bitcoin attack. Hints of unmanageable abuse would be exchanges de-listing alternative cryptocurrencies due to mounting losses.
The bottom line is if Bitcoin can't survive a 51% attack, then everything else below it is non-viable.
Personally I think the gaping vulnerabilities of altcoins and the scalability of Ethereum is a bigger issue than what may happen to Bitcoin over the next decade+. Major catastrophes with any of the other stuff could go a long way toward causing loss of trust, interest, and value in Bitcoin.
Not an expert but I found that a readable summary of different layer 2 scaling strategies and why Ethereum developers prefer Rollups instead of Channels (like Lightning):
The Ethereum design docs could link to direct-listed premined [stable] coins as a solution for Proof of Work and TPS reports: https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp
(edit) re: n-layer solutions: The https://interledger.org/ RFCs and something like Transaction Permission Layer (TPL) will probably be helpful for interchain compliance.
> Interledger is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency.
From https://tplprotocol.org/ :
> The challenge: Current blockchain-based protocols lack an effective governance mechanism that ensures token transfers comply with requirements set by the project that issued the token.
> Projects need to set requirements for a variety of reasons. For instance, remaining compliant with securities laws, limiting transfer to beta testers, or limiting transfer to a particular geo-spatial location. Whatever your reason, if a requirement can be verified by a third-party, TPL will be able to help.
In the US, S-Corps can't have international or more than n shareholders, for example; so if firms even wanted to issue securities on a first-layer network, they'd need an extra-chain compliance mechanism to ensure that their issuance is legal pursuant to local, sovereign, necessary policies. Re-issuing stock certificates is something that has to be done sometimes. When is it possible to cancel outstanding tokens?
Nano has been on my eye for a while now. I hope Nano will get the attention it deserves. Sub second feeless money settlement transactions is such a game changer. Nano just works.
- energy usage of gold is worse, that's not a good argument. What is the energy use of air conditioners?
- transactions are slow yes but bitcoin is now used as a store of value
- I'm sorry but nano doesn't have the network effect Bitcoin has and never will.
Do you think most miners are continuously auditing the blocks they are solving?
Yes, long-term they'd switch away from a dishonest/non-value-aligned pool, but the damage might already be done at that point.
Ok, what if they agree somehow either by govt order or massive worm hack (Stuxnet like)?
And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Stop giving such these weak arguments - most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.
Not saying you're wrong, but this feels like every subreddit dedicated to a crypto.
This seems a little ironic after complaining about shilling.
You have NanoTrade where these things are discussed, and you have NanoCurrency where Nano itself and adoption is discussed.
Given that the technology determines the timeframe over which you can make money, this seems like a weird position to take.
Nice to hear someone say the quiet part loud. Could you tell all the rest of the most-of-us to be honest about that too? It'd save me a lot of time in conversations where people refuse to consider any Bitcoin alternatives because they'd lose money if people started to switch.
Monero's technology enables private and untraceable transactions. It's amazing and I own some just because of that property. Seems to be the only cryptocurrency that still aims to be an actual currency.
You're right about the altcoins though.
That, combined with the privacy makes it seem really usable. I’d love a way to make cheap, private, digital payments
Not exactly. The decoy inputs/outputs provide some plausible deniability when you look at a transaction in isolation, but over repeated transactions it gets gradually lost. It's not enough to pin you as a criminal with 100% certainty, but it's enough for the police to keep an eye on you and wait for you to slip up.
Doesn't this require an exchange to provide external information? It is my understanding that it's impossible to correlate transactions using blockchain analysis alone.
or a donation address, or a cooperative counterparty when you buy/sell something (think darknet market that got radided, or a payment processor that sells its transaction information).
How will people tell the difference?
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.
Which just underlines how much of this whole phenomenon is brand and hype.
Technology isn't a linear tech tree with newer == better. In some very real ways, Bitcoin is like a a new car design with some interesting new technologies (e.g. a satellite radio receiver) but that doesn't support other technologies like seatbelts.
Dismissing something as "<past-time-period> technology" is lazy. You really need to compare explicit pros and cons.
Talk about a step backward.
In Europe SEPA Instant requires transfers take less than 10 seconds in anything other than exceptional circumstances, and costs the same to transfer between any of the 36 member countries.
> At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
Ironic. So many discussions of Bitcoin's utility implicitly assume that the rest of the world also has the same sort of antiquated banking and payment systems used in the US.
Wouldn't it take a large number of resources and coordinated effort to do this? And then the result of a successful attack means that the value essentially drops to zero ... so why invest the effort?
Seems like the only entity to have this incentive would be central banks / fiat regimes.
Besides trying to destroy bitcoin, couldn't such an attack be used to simply drive up transaction fees for anyone who wanted to use it? For instance, if they refuse to process transactions with a fee below a threshold, they'd leave money on the table in the sort term, but eventually the higher fee requirement would have to be discovered and transactions reissued to pay it.
It's a self-funded project by the founder (No VC's, No ICO, No Presale, etc.) with a fair launch and the team has already developed a live central bank digital currency called Bakong in Cambodia.
Not true. The energy used to power the bitcoin network has been stable for a few years.
If a 51% attack occurs, the bitcoin full nodes are still fundamentally in control. Full nodes decide whether or not to accept a blockchain, they socially decide whether to accept a 51% attack. They can hard fork and change the hashing algorithm, firing all current miners.
How does Nano prevent me from setting up two servers, sending the money to different nodes, and double-spending the money?
(that being said, it becoming more centralized might be an issue for security, yes. I don't know how (de)centralized it currently is though)
Also, isn't there a rule or guideline or something discouraging talking about how getting downvoted?
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The only "Federal agency" targeting Tether was the New York Attorney General's office, however the investigation was settled last month with with no admission of guilt from Tether.
Time, in the human sense, seems somewhat irrelevant because humans can't/don't hash manually.
Disclaimer: This site doesn't work in Firefox on Android for some reason, so I'm asking in total ignorance of the article's content.
PoS solves the problem of mining and wasted energy.
Cardano's Ouroboros is a provable and secure Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol.
https://docs.cardano.org/en/latest/explore-cardano/relevant-...
For a value of "solves" that doesn't actually include anyone solving anything YET. Maybe in 18 months!
Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_.
Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.
That's not as true as I would have thought. Surprisingly, a single person can have a profitable mining setup on Bitcoin today. It might only be $10 USD per day profit, but it's something. To me, that is an achievement.
However, in practice, it seems that it almost works the other way around.
To mine on BTC, you cannot enter the game with 10$ to your name. You can't buy a mining rig, it is way too wasteful to mine on your existing CPU, etc.
However if we look for example at staking in Ethereum, there are decentralized (no trust required) pools that allow you to stake however little amount of ETH. The chain itself will require at least 32ETH to run a single meaningful staking contract, but through pooling this is directly practically accessible to anyone with even small amount of ETH.
Just making money, yes you can pool together. And that's a great feature of smart contract networks. But we are also seeing smart contracts being brought into Bitcoin that allows the same things. I just think sovereignty and making money shouldn't be conflated.
bizarre.
What do you see in Cardano that makes it a poor candidate for a future blockchain? Governance? Functionality? Algorithms? Investment?
but more meaningful opposition would be in why use a DPoS network now that we can have PoS networks without the delegation? if you value decentralisation and think it has a future why would you go for a DPoS network that can so far just send tokens, there are better dpos networks like cosmos or polkadot, and ethereum is moving to pos. What is cardano actually (still attempting) to solve that hasnt already been solved by polkadot/cosmos?
Why use haskell as the contract language? do you think in the limited pool of blockchain developers there are many people are wanting to write haskell? and that they are going to port all the existing tokens/defi/contracts made over the past few years to a haskell+utxo model? who is expected to build on this. in 15 years of dev work ive met a handful of haskell devs, they are all in academia and dont make production software.
And alongside that, and why i refer to it being pumped, is that it is getting so much publicity but barely being used. i just looked at the block explorer and in the past ten blocks three are empty and the rest have a top of 10 transactions being processed. Where are the supposed network effects driving it? shouldnt the blockspace be in demand? especially with the recent price surge, if the price is going up but it has empty blocks surely that is a bad sign?
Because it doesn't seem to be going away faster than the newer generations. There is a real chance that if cryptocurrency ends up being a thing forever that BTC is the winner. And that is an environmental disaster until we get to 100% clean energy worldwide.
The way the scaling operates, as it goes along, even if you had FREE energy piped from a hyperspatial link in the heart of the Sun… eventually the ASIC farms themselves will begin to cook the planet.
It doesn't stay alive and profitable unless it keeps burning energy MORE. The fact that the energy's going to come from the dirtiest and most dangerous (cheapest) possible fuels, is certainly a problem and will continue to be one for as long as such fuels exist, but in the literal absence of fuel and cost of fuel, the exponential-growth thing just switches to the computers turning (now free and infinite) energy into calculation.
There is always a bigger server farm, because such a thing costs money, and those with money are the ones who can and will make more of it. With cryptocurrency, that's just literal, and their profitability is always a perfect and direct match with how hard they can cheat or abuse any possible rule there to constrain them. The end result, perfectly untraceable and fungible, as long as the system is allowed to continue.
Disaster will always be more profitable, in cryptocurrency-land. I mean, I suppose you could play nice and barely make any money…