ajkdhcb2

Very discouraging. Few people seem to realise the importance of the direction of browser development, setting standards of the web etc. The situation is very bad.

>Buyer protection has rarely been something one needs.

I disagree, I think it is the biggest factor. I used it several times and I know other people who have too.

>you can't (easily) charge back already effectuated transfer

I promise if you try to do something involving bank transfers without doing some form of 'Know Your Customer' you'll get people try to use bank accounts that are compromised in some way. You'll be getting calls from your bank and potentially lose money, and may get your bank account closed if you persist with that behavior

Fraud. Hacked bank accounts. Chargebacks. The brutality of banking customer service. These are all good reasons. PayPal does have a dispute system for 'buyer/seller protection'.

Every day I see news that makes me ask myself... the world decided 'lockdowns are worth it and you're an anti-vaxxer if you disagree'.... using calculations that ignored how many factors?

The term Public Relations was coined by Edward Bernays, whom wrote the incredibly influential book quite literally called 'Propaganda' in 1928. That should make it clear enough.

The question itself presupposes that there is an investigation, so they are essentially saying that if there were such materials it would be covered by that reason.

FOIA would be abused like crazy to unearth classified information if this method of questioning worked

>A FOIA response of this nature indicates there's some level of investigation occurring

How is that possible when it says "the Commission does not disclose the existence or non-existence of an investigation"?

"the Commission does not disclose the existence or non-existence of an investigation" seems to make it clear that law enforcement activities may not exist either. In order to comply with that, they would not be able to answer something like 'we do not have any records because there is no investigation', so you necessarily get a vague letter like this that seems like it may be suggesting there is an investigation.

The same form of letter was sent a month ago, so that just reflects badly on them

I don't know about Canada specifically, but generally there are situations where one can be waiting for a residence permit or waiting to be fully registered as a resident, etc. It can take several months in some western European countries despite the same laws that nobody can be denied a bank account. This can create a lot of inconvenience for legal residents that recently immigrated since some of those countries also have systems that use banks for ID.

Yes. The tweet crops out a following paragraph that says it should not be taken as evidence that an investigation is underway. So this is fake news.

You can see the full letter here: https://twitter.com/CryptoWhale/status/1429819156052983816

The fees and inconvenience are only an issue for regular traders that are repeatedly buying and selling. For 6+ figure amounts it is even better to use 'over the counter' peer-to-peer services. Companies that are buying hundreds of millions worth are not using exchanges. I found it easy to do 5 figure trades even in 2014. There are significant fees and inconveniences when moving fiat to centralised exchanges so it evens out.

Does this basically force people to have a Canadian bank account to survive?

Funnily enough, localbitcoins has required KYC for some time, and even prohibited face-to-face cash trades.

However there are alternatives such a localmonero and localcryptos so you are correct in concept.

I keep seeing Australians online saying this meme that Australians care a lot about coffee quality, but when I lived there everyone I knew would make instant coffee at home. Then they were often highly critical of espresso at cafes. Odd

The current algorithm takes a completely different approach compared to when there were failures several years ago. It's not marketing, people have been rightfully sceptical but it seems like it works

In an imagined future where well-designed custody systems were the norm, bad actors would realise there's no point because they don't want to be locked in a house torturing someone for 3 days for no payoff

>it takes renewable energy reserves away from something useful

Not necessarily true because energy transport and storage can be a serious issue that makes other usages impractical. Bitcoin mining can be done at the energy source regardless of the location.

Monero addresses this by using an ASIC-resistant proof of work algorithm: general purpose hardware is used for mining, which won't just be thrown away because it can be sold and used for other purposes

All of those points seem invalid to me when you consider that people have the option for custodial multi-signature systems and time-delays etc. If you want certain behaviour you can do it, often without giving a corrupt organisation complete control over your money

Further, many people live in countries where the people simply cannot trust their institutions or the value of their currencies, to the point where they are better off storing USD under their mattress, so the technology should be there for those people

Unnecessary intermediaries should be removed. Especially intermediaries with a horrendous corruption track record that coerce you to let them hold your money. Money that can be printed at will by some people in power is also quite a joke; cryptocurrency provides a new unit of account in addition to a payment system.

You have a great point and for this reason Monero should be viewed differently. It is not bitcoin. However, the technology is just not at the point where you can have a protocol that is fixed in stone, and bitcoin is not something that I think is good for the world because it is a dangerous tool of mass surveillance which you can't fix without fundamental changes.

>Having decentralization to the point that it becomes hard for developers to force through changes

This is happening to Monero too over time, as the community grows. I expect it will continue to become more difficult to gain consensus over time. There is, at least, many developers and no 'leader' figure like Vitalik

> was basically told to fuck off.

Provide information about your issues and they would be grateful.

> official desktop gui clients is completely unusable

It has improved significantly over time, perhaps this was a long time ago?

It is not safe to use Bitcoin and other traceable cryptocurrencies. I for one don't want to be tortured with a drill and there is a long list of such events: https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks

Some people say the same things about encryption, but it is a very accurate parallel that it actually makes society safer, and the technology can't be taken from "criminals" so you just have to deal with its existence.

Yes. This is intentional and required to make it possible to opt-in to revealing transaction information. This is useful and enables compliance with current regulations.

Of course you can delete that key if you want, and perhaps run multiple wallets with which you can transact with yourself

> the decoy based privacy protocols Monero uses are not really private at all.

This is simply not true, otherwise you should present real evidence. It is not perfect, but nothing ever will be, and Monero continues to move forward and use the best technology available. Research continues, and they hope to move away from "decoy based protocols" altogether eventually, but the tradeoffs have so far been too great. Unlike bitcoin, it is able to do large changes, since there is a completely different development culture

There was a bug, with which the Zcash developers could have used to generate infinite coins for themselves, and it so far cannot be proven that this did not occur. I do not know how so few people are aware of it. I do not mean the trusted setup, but this: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcash-counterfeiting-vuln...

The developers were funded by suspicious government organisations including DARPA and Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology.

It is centralised, with an organisation receiving significant coins directly from the protocol.

Opt-in privacy defeats much of the point and creates traceability issues - privacy needs to be the default for people to use it, for their coins to not be treated suspiciously if they turn on the privacy feature, and it is a requirement to have a large anonymity set.

Among other reasons, there are many...

The block reward will continue to repeatedly halve over time until it reaches zero and dramatically decreases the incentive to mine. That requires no changes.

>"Why can't my car do 600km/h, it can only do 200km/h?" "Nothing is stopping it. Board a maglev train and you can do far more than 200 km/h."

Going by this analogy, you are commenting on an article about maglev trains. The article is about lightning network transactions. So you've gone completely off-topic? Why even talk about "transaction costs of the blockchain itself" if you think lightning transactions arent bitcoin transactions?

>What do off-chain transactions like Lightning have to do with the transaction costs of the blockchain itself?

Facilitating off-chain transactions lowers demand for on-chain transactions. Off-chain transactions arent possible without the underlying blockchain, yet they can fulfill the use-case of small bitcoin transactions. You can't separate the two.

>All sorts of things could change this - changes in the protocol to allow bigger blocks, changes in the hashrate that most miners are willing to invest, changes in mining hardware efficiency etc. But what you are claiming...

Back up the comment chain you were arguing that changing electricity prices etc would not affect the energy usage... I think you have changed what you are arguing about. Previously you disagreed with this:

"Bitcoin use and mining power are completely uncorrelated. By mining bitcoins, your earn as much as the computational fraction you are representing. So, indeed, there was a race to more and more mining power in the recent years but it can completely be reversed. For example if electricity prices rises."

Do you know what the lightning network is? It changes all of these relationships, and it is key to what we are talking about, but you didnt mention it in this comment.

Separately to the lightning network, the security (hashrate, energy usage) is still not directly linked to the number of on-chain transactions that are processed. You can compute "a practical energy/block" specifically for bitcoin but it does not translate to a meaningful energy/transaction value because the quantity of energy used is not directly caused by transactions. You can have a less-secure blockchain that does many more transactions than bitcoin with low energy usage (altcoins exist) - if these are low value transactions then people won't even be incentivised to attack it. The relationship is NOT just energy/transaction. Your estimated energy/transaction value will keep changing because that's not the relationship; the new coins in the block reward will eventually drop to zero, the value processed by the network will change, the ASIC development situation will change, etc. It's like finding a runner that eats icecream and computing icecream/kilometre.

>Again, if you don't believe this, you should ask yourself what stops the bitcoin blockchain from processing 1 billion transactions/second instead of the current pitiful ~2 hundred transactions.

Nothing is stopping it. Run your own lightning node and you can do more transactions than what you are erroneously claiming

I am struggling the follow the argument through the comment chain. Energy is used to secure the chain via mining; a secure network is required to be a payment system, but the energy usage is not from processing transactions.

Originally the discussion is about people "using Bitcoin to pay for their McDonalds". Then the commenter erroneously stated, in response to that, that a "bitcoin transaction uses the energy equivalent the entire lifespan of a tree". El Salvador is using the lightning network. These transactions are done off-chain. So the transaction fees do not even go to miners. There can be thousands of McDonalds transactions that occur off-chain and are eventually settled on-chain in one transaction. Processing and validating transactions is very computationally easy. You can indeed do it on a laptop.

Mining blocks is a separate issue. If you ignore the competitive security race, then the network can indeed function on a laptop. Most the mining race that is currently occurring is because people are fighting to win the block reward - this would happen even if nobody were transacting, and someone doing a lightning network transaction has truly negligible effect on that energy usage.

When you said "bitcoin would become valueless, as everyone with a laptop could produce their own longest blockchain where they have half of all bitcoin" this shows you don't understand the process, because the difficulty would rise until people can no longer produce blocks so rapidly. You're describing a situation where miners are not even on the same network so it doesnt make sense