"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.
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.
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.
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.
If you just replace "horses" with "mass public transit", "railroads" and "electrobikes", it suddenly starts to make much more sense.
It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.
Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
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.
> 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.
What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
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.
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!
So far I have reverted only once on HN.
According to OP's comment, it has received 76 - 11 = 65 karma as of now.
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.
What's concerning is its the top comment on this HN thread.
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.
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.
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.
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).
People insist on chaos with Bitcoin. It's the only way you can make money off of it.
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..
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.
Would you say eventually everyone who wants dollars will have enough and the demand for new dollars will be zero?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
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.
I'm not an economist, but nothing has convinced me yet that bitcoin is not the best form of money.
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.
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?
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.
Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
In comparison to what?
What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
—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.
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.
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.
Right now it's not so bad, but the trajectory is a real problem.
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.
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...
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.
hint: posts mostly consist of "<famous guy> tweeted about <my favourite shitcoin>, this is good for the price of <my favourite shitcoin>".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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'
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.
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.
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...
You can infinitely copy information. It's in the article.
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.
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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):
Not true. The energy used to power the bitcoin network has been stable for a few years.
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?
How will people tell the difference?
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
T
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-...
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.
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.
For a value of "solves" that doesn't actually include anyone solving anything YET. Maybe in 18 months!
bizarre.
