anythingdude321

listen to uncommon core, every episode starting with the first, and you'll have a nice view from the inside. signal-to-noise ratio in crypto is atrocious, high signal sources are alpha

metallic standards often had debasement (that's why it's called debasement). but also no one is arguing that inflation is a function of ONLY money printing, but no one can argue that money printing is not one of the inputs that determines inflation

nah fam that won't likely be the final topology of the network. you can have oracles all the way down and a slashing risk for those that deviate significantly from the consensus prices and CPI numbers. so you're trusting the economic design of the system to appropriately incentivize the participants to give honest data

this is a reference to a famous Milton Friedman quote "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" — of course this is a tautology, but he didn't mean the trivial version when he said it, but rather he was making an empirical claim.

in this piece it looks like the author is making the tautological version of the claim, by following up and describing it as "a function of money printing" — which is obviously true it is a function of money printing and several other things

Including the computation and data on-chain enables other parties to use it trustlessly and verifiably. If you, for example, wanted to make an algorithmic central bank that reacted to inflation numbers you would need on-chain CPI in order to do that. Similarly you may want to index your interest rate to the CPI in some way (like LIBOR). It becomes a lot more useful when on-chain than in a central database

Don't want to duck your question but: the reason this is hard to get a handle on is that it's really complicated.

It's not that the premises and protocols themselves are complicated — sure, they're technically sophisticated, but they can be explained simply. The problem lies in that it is very hard to predict the economic consequences and security guarantees of the various consensus mechanisms. Frankly, if Bitcoin hadn't been working flawlessly for the past 12 years very few people would guess that it would work.

so nice to see the hackernews crowd finally figuring it out!

i totally agree with you. i feel that if you keep digging, you'll find yourself convinced over time that BTC's "technical challenges" are not the flaws that they originally appear, and that in the long run crypto does make sense as a currency itself, in addition to a financial infrastructure.

There is no alternative for the monetization of an asset. Gold was the same. Some people believed in it, many didn't, and as it monetized over time those that believed in it early benefited most.

The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.

yes but that is a use. bitcoin is useful as a savings technology. that is how monetary technology should work, especially at first

if you leverage your risk for a higher return you _also_ increase your risk

economic majority for the USD is the Federal Reserve Board

yes but the beauty is that, due to the lack of a central authority, the game theory of the situation virtually ensures that no one would ever do that — that is, take bitcoin2 seriously

that...doesn't make any sense. return 50x is returning 50x. many people would be thrilled to have 50-100k. It means a better house, maybe better schools, better food, better life. and that's just in America!

Envy is the thief of joy

the return on holding is not risk free. in the absence of progress money will be inflationary as there are more people competing for fewer goods. there's no free lunch

Tether has accounting problems and remains a systemic risk. But this is mitigated by several factors. First, they are semi-audited and most educated guesses suggest they are collateralized one-to-one with $ at 70% or more. Second, tethers have become less systemically important over time, as other, better audited (or collateralized) stables have taken market share — this trend will likely continue. Third, tether brr doesn't compare to Fed brr and never will be able to, so ultimately, this won't matter in the long run.

Run for office? I prefer the trim tab approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metapho...

If Bitcoiners are right, Satoshi has been the trim tab of the century thus far. Time will tell :)

this has been discussed to death. ultimately Nic Carter's piece settles it i think: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

"Ultimately it’s just a matter of opinion as to whether the existence of a non-state, synthetic monetary commodity is a good idea. The truth is that blockspace is a service which is paid for, and that’s where its resource cost is derived. Something duly purchased cannot, by definition, be a waste. Its buyer derives benefit from its existence, regardless of anyone else’s subjective opinion of the merit of the transaction. These same arguments have been made countless times about perceived “costs” of the gold standard, and rebutted on similar grounds before. Fundamentally, millions of individuals the world over still value physical, bank-independent savings, so it still gets pulled out of the ground with regularity. As long as people value Bitcoin, so, too, will the block-space auction continue in perpetuity.

The Bitcoin-energy worriers need not despair, however. There is a solution. All they must do is persuade Bitcoin fans to use and value an alternative settlement medium. Their best bet will be to devise a system that is even more secure, offers stronger assurances, settles faster, is more privacy preserving and is more censor resistant – all without using Proof-of-Work. Such a system would be miraculous. I’m waiting with bated breath."

there are many problems better solved by bitcoin than classical solutions. one example is as a bank account in a low trust society with high inflation (there are many such countries). creating a bitcoin wallet is extraordinarily easy and once you've acquired the bitcoin it's uncensorable and unconfiscatable. this is better than the classical solution, right?

aahhh just another one of Ramanujan's random identities that he divined from the minds of the gods. reading these has been a reliable way for mathematicians to humble themselves since 1900.

he often wouldn't (or wasn't able to) prove them. they were just assertions that, much more often than not, turned out to be accurate.

because it was first and has proven itself to be both immutable and highly secure. this leads to network effects. and money is the ultimate network effect. people want money because they know others want money and will therefore accept it in exchange for other things.

software people in stable states have had a hard time understanding why bitcoin could be valuable. consider that the dollar may not be desirable for such transactions in the future if its basis is unstable (not uncommon in many countries around the world). when you consider the instability of the US government of late, we must agree that there is a non-zero probability of confidence in the dollar diminishing significantly. multiply this probability times what you think the price of bitcoin would be in such a world. that's why people want bitcoin.