Bitcoin Post-Mortem | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Post-Mortem

itisbit.com

16 pointsreteltech14 comments

> P.S. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.

LOL

No wonder this guy is salty. For perspective, Craig Wright-is-Satoshi acolytes believe that “BSV” (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision), which is dying and in fact nearly dead, is the true Bitcoin and that the mainstream BTC is a fork.

This also explains why the entire lengthy article never mentioned the lightning network which facilitates micropayments beautifully.

"P.S. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto."

Up until that point, you weren't an idiot and just a frustrated developer.

My mate worked with Craig at CenterBet. Its interesting how this name is now international. My mate wouldnt decribe him as a genius, but did receive emails from him in this era on the topic that his law team has been interested in.

Small world.

> the public believes the best use case for Bitcoin is to not use it. This counterintuitive idea has nothing to do with the vision for Bitcoin described in the original white paper. Bitcoin is intended to be used, not just held.

> How come the only use case seems to be a dishonest pyramid scheme?

Because the fixed supply encourages hoarding.

If bitcoin wanted to encourage use over holding, it should have done without the reward halvings. Just have a fixed reward, i.e. a pure linear emission. Now it takes n years to get yearly supply inflation down to 1/n. This vastly reduces the fear of missing out and speculation, while encouraging use as a currency.

Why are we doing a post mortem on a thing that is running perfectly fine, and has a 10 year CAGR that blows away the S&P 500?

This is dumb.

"This is a brand problem and has nothing to do with technology. "

This I would question. Clearly btc was modeled on the production of a physical commodity. It was not designed to operate like money, but like a goldbug's fantasy of money. The result was not an accident, it was inevitable.

Physical commodities do not have their production forcibly halved every few years. The bitcoin emission is heavily front-loaded and looks nothing like Gold's.

So it's actually worse than a real commodity. It's got an expiration date. For system that's supposed to be 'currency', that's just stupid.

I find it curious that no mention is made of the enormous amount of energy required to mine bitcoin. I can't reconcile how with such high costs for equipment and electricity and the slowness/cost in verifying transactions that bitcoin could be used for micropayments. Anybody care to explain?

It probably won't be used for micropayments. Those are the costs of removing the middleman.

Some n amount is not required. Energy usage varies based on how many miners are running. It is a form of Sybil resistance, which may be understood better by reading white paper.

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread is the LN network which is cheap, fast, and low energy. LN allows spending coin pegged off the main chain.

The amount of electricity is proportional to the price. Transaction rates are completely separate from the amount of electricity it takes to mine.

Every other cryptocurrency can handle far more transactions than bitcoin. Only bitcoin has a transaction rate of 1.1 kilobytes per second (lower than a 14.4 modem). Increasing throughput does not affect the electricity needed, but bitcoin refuses to do it to sell a second layer that no one wants or needs. A scammer name Craig Wright made a fork of bitcoin to exploit some people who recognized the need for more throughput.

I know someone who went all-in on Blockfi to get yields. They went all-in on crypto b/c their uncle made a bunch of money in crypto during the run up.

Well, hopefully their uncle can also bail them out ... they lost all their money. Over half a million dollars (!!!!!!!!)

Cool story.

Now, how is this relevant?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com