tracedddd

They are somewhere in between, guess we’ll have to see.

Cryptocurrency has indeed been through several speculative bubbles, and we may even be in the midst of one now.

However, I think the speculative bubble valuation of 2010 is well justified now. The thing about speculation is that sometimes the speculators are right. Tesla is almost certainly in a speculative bubble, too, but every day they arguably justify a higher base value.

That said, you seem relatively balanced for a crypto critic, and didn’t miss the boat but rather jumped off, so I’m not sure you’re part of the cohort I’m describing.

This place was flooded with extremely biased nocoiners long before energy consumption was a hot topic.

I truly believe it’s simply that they want it to fail since they missed the boat, and their ego is on the line as a forward thinking, “ahead of the curve” technologist.

It can’t be the biggest development of the last decade, what would that say about them? Therefore, inefficient ponzi that’s only used for drugs!

It’s getting old seeing the same posts with no new data or analysis day after day.

I get that people feel this is important, or perhaps are excited to share something wrong with Bitcoin, but I’d be surprised if 99% of the regular visitors to this site haven’t heard about Bitcoin’s energy use and perhaps heard some counterarguments already several times.

It really does seem like a grudge more than a genuine care. For example, you can often find some of the same accounts parroting cherry picked takes or intentionally misleading comparisons in the comments.

This isn’t true, you could still mine (poorly) with reduced RAM by recomputing as needed. And I’m not sure what you mean by “clocking-in” a share in a useful timespan. Compromised devices aren’t people, so they don’t care if a particular machine can’t get regular payouts. If the whole network can reliably find a low diff share solutions anywhere it can make money.

It would be horribly inefficient however a network of tens or hundreds of thousands of low resource units can absolutely make money since the costs are zero.

Pathetic that this is even happening. Is there any trustworthy cell provider now? I’d switch over this but T-Mobile was the one least complicit in NSA spying.

The energy usage of Bitcoin or similar projects like Ethereum are derived from the “mining” aspect which is not connected to transactions or transaction volume.

For example, early Bitcoin was generally, for purposes of discussion, about the same transaction throughput as we have today. But there were very few miners, so the energy costs were very low. Was Bitcoin truly many orders of magnitude more efficient back then? No.

It’s simply that there are many many more miners competing for rewards, because Bitcoin is valuable. There’s an energy lottery built into the Bitcoin protocol that emits new currency.

This lottery is directly related to the security of the network but not the number of transactions or usage. Unfortunately it’s hard to find an exact parallel but something like the military protection of the dollar would be a more valid comparison than Visa’s transaction volume.

Consider this: even if the blocks were empty, which means no transactions, the energy usage would be the same.

DartMUD has made me much of who I am. I can’t point to a single other influence that has had such an impact. You should visit and see what beauty permadeath, unrestricted pk, and strict in-character only interaction can bring, if you’re interested in MUDs. But be warned, you may lose yourself in it.

That doesn’t happen with BCH because they haven’t saturated their blocks. That doesn’t mean it’s a better approach.

I can decide to spend all my retirement savings over the next two years and, for a while, it would be quite nice. Should I then ask why anyone even bothers to save?

We’re outpacing Moore’s law

2mb or 4mb would have helped, yes. I don’t think it would have been too big of a problem, but I don’t think it would help much either. We’d just be back against the limit.

If we want to really succeed we need innovation.

Bitcoin added 66GB to it’s permanent ledger in the last year. Saturated 16Mb blocks would add a Tb a year. It’s hard to see how that won’t be centralizing after a few years and people need 3TB just to get started. Not to mention the task of syncing and transferring on a less than perfect connection. Yes, storage does get cheaper, but cryptocurrency is outpacing it dramatically.

And even with these big blocks, we’d have nowhere near a competitive solution, less than 7% of Visa volume. “Raise the block size again” would only get so far. We need something better. I’m not sure lightning is the answer, but at least it shows such a thing is possible. We don’t need big blocks.

That is indeed the claim made by Bitcoin Cash promoters. However it’s not particularly convincing to treat Satoshi’s vision as the ultimate truth, and borders on religious. Shouldn’t developers who have now worked with this technology for a decade have a greater understanding, now? One of Bitcoin’s greatest attributes is that it can evolve and be updated!

Furthermore BCH has seen virtually no transactions, especially compared to bitcoin, so all it’s claims of superiority are untested. This makes people who proclaim them as facts quite suspect.

For example - since you don’t understand why - big blocks centralize. “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node. Of course, since there have historically been virtually no transactions on BCH, it’s easy to throw this consideration to the wind and claim the solution is infallible.

Is that the future we want, when even when pushed to it’s maximum vanilla on-chain cryptocurrency struggles to compete with Visa or Coinbase for usability? Or should we strive to maximize what cryptocurrency really delivers on: uncensorable settlement of a stateless store of value?

You need to think beyond the initial numbers.

It’s a clean energy subsidy. Be it hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, or cold fusion - create it and the returns are yours indefinitely.

Indeed, much of mining is already hydroelectric, and much is overage that can’t be stored. This is not just sugarcoating or PR. Miners are highly incentivized to find these situations and exploit them. The more that happens, the less “bad” miners can even compete.

True, it is a challenge do do a decentralized on/off ramp. But it is also questionable if that’s worth $100B valuation, too, without everything else they do.

I’m talking about DeFi - distributed exchanges, yield generating savings accounts, and collateralized loans. Additionally ERC20 stables so on and off ramps are significantly less important. I see Coinbase’s primary function as an exchange and a way to convert to dollars. Both are threatened now. They have low fees, low latency, and more usability... but will that last?

“Obviously if Bitcoin succeeds so does Coinbase”

This seems obvious, but I’m not sure it’s the case anymore.

DeFi has been growing, although hampered by ethereum right now, could eventually consume much of Coinbase’s income stream.

They may need to pivot to more of a banking role as ethereum solves tx fees and DeFi grows on L2. Whether that means more or less profit is not clear. I have a theory this IPO is really a calculated approach to facing such a reality, while they’re still considered untouchable.

It can be extended if necessary.

If you assume tether is largely legitimate, the observable behaviors would look indistinguishable from the claims of fraud.

Tether “being printed” is per design. Just like wire transfers and account signups to Coinbase, they align with spikes in price.

That’s not to say they are legitimate either, but the constant conjecture about it is mostly people confused about causation.

I won’t shill you on anything in particular.

But regardless of your opinion on crypto you haven’t missed your opportunities. Projects still 100x.

Next time it’s off everyone’s mind and not in the news, just pick 3 or 4 newer projects that have a decent sounding team, put $1000 in on each, and forget about it. Check back when everyone is manic again.

That’s the whole point of the article, from what I understood. AES and most hash algorithms were quantum safe. They’re claiming they found new attacks on previously assumed quantum safe systems.

That’s not to say they can perform them, just that (if we believe them) quantum computers are fundamentally stronger than expected.

Well, Ethereum. Cardano is doing the contending.

ZCash’s parent company, Electric Coin Co., has also been the source of a lot of innovation. For example, the L2 “Optimism” scaling solution that looks very promising for Ethereum uses zk rollups which is the direct result of zksnarks research deployed in ZCash.

I’m moderately smart at best, probably less, I didn’t mean it as an insult. I apologize if it came off that way.

I meant that it appealed to people that understand the value in peer reviewed research, but weren’t about to go actually get involved with the actual research mentioned or question it. That could be for a variety of reasons.

Absolutely no offense to OP here, but my experience with Cardano is that it appears to be a trap for moderately smart people who don’t have time to read cryptocurrency whitepapers all day.

Staking is nothing new, smart contracts are nothing new. The thing that Cardano does well is strong signaling that it’s inclusive, and based on research.

However, that’s somewhat begging the question. Their serious competitors are just as inclusive and largely just as based on legitimate research! There are a lot of low grade scammy coins out there, but claiming you’re doing better than them is not an accomplishment.

Unrealized, but regardless will be a mind blowing return in any case. Then again, he did proselytize others to the position, so it makes sense given the similarly mind blowing popularity.

It’s basically impossible without a radical change to their business model, so this is just PR psyops.

Unfortunately investors would greatly prefer a slow death of the company, while committing constant invasions of privacy on the entire world, than the great risk of a self induced reform.

Especially when they can get half the benefits for free by leaking fake memos and ineffective privacy control knobs.

Even so, they’re still dangerous. No one in car crazy America is going to put their kids on an Apple motorcycle and run through rush hour traffic where everyone is watching TikTok videos while driving. Even the wind noise, debris hitting you, and weather considerations alone make it a no-go. Losing a wheel usually means going down. 99% of people strongly value that they will walk away from a crash fine with great probabilities. That simply cannot be said of 2 wheeled vehicles like it can be said of crumple zone air bag equipped 4 wheeled vehicles.

I’d definitely get one though.

With a bunch of Apple integrations, and you don’t need to park or pick up, available in any major city in the world with a click, sure.

I wouldn’t buy a modern vehicle without CarPlay. It’s simply that good, and I’m pretty Apple critical these days.

I still like vintage junkers that are easy to work on, but there’s about two decades of nope for me now.

The plastic definitely makes modern cars feel dated quickly, but the tech alone ages really fast. Even simple back up cameras that are 3 years old seem really low definition compared to the new birds eye surround cameras. Not to mention the UIs are laggy, and Bluetooth even feels like old tech now. If it doesn’t have CarPlay or equivalent it’s a downgrade.

You’re probably right, but doesn’t Apple kind of seem like a company that would be well positioned to reduce all these issues for a luxury price? Well, perhaps besides moralist issues, if the App Store is any indication.