Experimenting with currencies like china is doing with a fully digital currency is good but only if it contributes to a potential socialist future. Bitcoin contributes to climate change and reinforces a techbro capitalist future
Like everything else in techbro culture, it's wonderful in a socialist future, but in a capitalist one, it's another system of control and exploitation.
It is estimated that one account, Satoshi Nakamoto's, holds around 1 million bitcoins. More than anyone else, it's about 1/13th of total bitcoins. If he ever cashed out the market would absolutely crash hard. For example when 26,000 bitcoins were unloaded on it slashed market prices by 10%. We don't know much about Satoshi, if they even have access to the wallet still, but just that idea alone makes it seem even more unpredictable than bitcoin already is.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme
"These coins will make you rich as long as you hype it up and get ten more people to buy them!"
you thought about buying in 2009? Jesus, I thought I was early first hearing about it in 2011 (fucked it up tho). How did you hear about it, were you on one of the early mailing lists? It's just pretty rare to have been privy to it in 2009.
I heard about it around 2009 because I was big into mocking libertarians, though I didn't have a job or money at the time so I couldn't have invested even if I had wanted to (which I didn't).
1,000,000 bitcoin currently equals ~47 billion dollars. If that's a third of the total, then that means all bitcoin combined is still less than 1 Bezos
Oh I misread 1/13 as 1/3rd oops, whatever
To me it's everything silicon valley and the disruption industry.
The difference IMO is that if China issues a digital Yuan, they just need to push out how much of this new currency they want/need.
With Bitcoin, the main problem is the mining infrastructure that consumes these enormous, ever-increasing amounts of energy.If we keep using currency, there are better digital alternatives than bitcoin that require far less power and storage, but they'll have to be pushed as real currency not as investment which is what drives bitcoin.
The one I liked is that visas network does 25k the transactions per second with 1/150k the energy cost per transaction.
You say that to bitcoin people and they "but the total energy of every bank is more"
That's why you measure per transaction.
That's why bitcoin is nothing but a pointless environmental disaster.
They also claim it promotes green energy instead of excess use of the cheapest energy they can get.
They also claim it promotes green energy instead of excess use of the cheapest energy they can get.
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Invest in bitcoin
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cash out
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buy solar panels
infinite energy cheat
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well yes, bitcoin does have flaws in its design that not only result in high fees, low throughput etc, but comparing it to visa is unfair, because visa "transactions" are analogous to simply changing two numbers in a spreadsheet, while bitcoin is obviously trying to do this in a secure and decentralized way
it does use a lot of energy, but imo it's a fair price to pay for the opportunity for countries to, say, evade certain sanctions and work around the dominance of the US dollar and all the accompanying negative consequences, but there are so many inefficiencies in the way human society works that provide literally no value and use vastly more energy, that i would say that bitcoin is worth it
if bitcoin successfully paves the way for the workarounds around the current dominant financial system, governments and users can and likely will adopt coins with a more fair and less energy wasteful PoW or switch to coins that use PoS
Visa does it in a secure and centralized way.
Your placing value in decentralization. Why? Because you've deluded yourself into thinking that this will somehow trigger revolution?
Visa does it in a secure and centralized way.
visa uses a proprietary protocol, and we have no idea what's going on in reality, security through obscurity has been shown times and times again to be shit
Your placing value in decentralization. Why? Because you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that this will somehow trigger revolution?
no, as i mentioned, as bitcoin is not controlled by one single entity, it can be used by people/countries somehow excluded from financial relations by use of sanctions
decentralization does not provide any inherent value, on the contrary actually, implementing decentralized protocols of any kind is always less efficient and much more complex, but with the current uncontrolled state of the financial sytem bitcoin provides a workaround for people/countries in need of such technology
unfortunately i can't, and it's unrealistic that any government would force them to do so, that's why bitcoin came around, and even if they did publish it, there is no way to make sure they're actually using this very protocol to exchange transactions, plus it doesn't eliminate transaction censorship and surveillance
even if they did publish it
They do, just not in a very public way to people outside the cryptography community, and there's no audit of course on the implementations. All of Visa's protocols are in some form in the papers published by Visa Research.
When your tech is incredibly wasteful, slow, can't scale and serves basically no real purpose then maybe you should just stop instead of trying to fix it.
Proof of stake or proof of work, it's still just the dumbest sort of capitalist excess.
btc and blockchain are solutions in search of a problem (that probably doesn't exist)
That's a false analogy. Crypto is like if you took the first nuclear reactor and started building powerplants based on its design.
The thing is that you can't really shut it down because it is so decentralized.
So centralize it.
Dump NSA resources in until you have control of the network then destroy it.
Again, the United States government benefits from the existence of cryptocurrency
Which is why they allow it to exist.
I'm saying the idea that it's safe or independent is a pipe dream.
I took a PhD course on blockchains and related consensus systems and yeah everything is a nightmare of power requirements and unclear mathematical rigor in a lot of instances (like Ethereums zero knowledge stuff has no actual published math backing it afaik). Same issue with the "privacy preserving" coins like Zcash and Monero, the math is just not there right now and all the developers just released their networks when they got VC funding.
Here's a recent paper that tries to analyze the security claims of several coins.
I mean to an extent the security claims are true, just not all of them are known to be and its not clear what modifications are required to prove the security properties they want. Monero is the most provably secure I think right now.
Anyone in here saying "well bitcoin is bad in capitalism but would be great in socialism!" needs to explain to me what the fuck they think bitcoin would do in a socialist world. What value would it add? What function would it provide to society? Why would it do that better than other systems? It just seems like it's a extremely volatile currency, doomed to perpetual boom and bust cycles. It does not exist to serve human need, and cannot be made to. Why the fuck would anyone want this?
Patrick Star meme: "But Andrew Yang will make NYC a hub for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies."
The only thing I could see would be if the world was a system of communes of like a few hundred thousand to few million people, and all those communes didn't trust each other but wanted to use one currency or ledger for certain things like whatever coordinated production there was, which seems a bit ridiculous.
It is, unfortunately, impossible to ban. Both due to bypassing network blocks being trivial and exchangers existing across a wide range of jurisdictions. Assuming even for a moment you could wipe out all exchangers, there are countless peer to peer exchange services, some of them not on the clearnet.
Best attempt would be to try and ban it in as many places as possible, hoping mining interest decreases, leaving the network open to an attack by a core of leftover miners, destroying its credibility. But that's extremely unlikely.
me trying to explain to stasi that my gtx 1070s are purely for rendering cartoon tiddies
Banning exchanges that convert fiat to Bitcoin and back would itself be a damn near killing blow, the price would drop massively overnight and with that miner interest.
It would still keep existing probably for drugs and such but it would never be as big again save for a massive collapse of a major fiat currency like the USD.
Say the US bans them; why would Russia or China, for example, follow suit ?
Because they don't want their own financial systems destabilized by magic internet money I suppose. Not saying it would happen for certain but if the governments of the world decided to get rid of Bitcoin they could do so easily.
A lot of anti-crypto talk in here. Are any of you familiar with proof of stake? Cardano and Ethereum for example utilize this. Much better than proof of work (mining) in numerous ways. Also, yes the ruling class is starting to get involved (after first ignoring it, ridiculing it, attacking it), but that doesn't make the decentralized nature of it any less groundbreaking. Will it be used for daily currency? No, but blockchain technology can be used in a lot of great ways. Like someone else said, in a socialist society it'd be great; in our capitalist society, maybe not so much--they'll commandeer it as much as possible, but we can hope for leaving capitalism behind while still embracing blockchain tech.
Honestly I think blockchain as a technology is way overhyped, and this is coming from someone currently working in one of them hip trendy blockchain startups.
It's fundamental promise is that the decentralization is going to increase trust between people and institutions and usher in more democracy but honestly I really don't see that happening. People trust people and institutions based on previous dealings with them, not because the blockchain said they signed their transactions with their private keys. People don't really give a shit whether some transaction settles in a classic CRUD database or on a fancy blockchain.
It's a cool idea for sure but honestly I don't see it being that useful in the long run.
Yeah just look at how many people do all their crypto trading over a centralized exchange. The math behind consensus systems like bitcoin is fun, but using them has practical concerns for many people.
good thing is faster and cheaper international transactions for some of the cryptos, that's pretty useful
I see what you're saying, there's a lot of responsibility put on the individual person that many people simply don't want to deal with, but in developing countries, where everyone has a cell phone but not really a place to bank, I could see it helping a lot.
...also, howd you get into such a startup?
…also, howd you get into such a startup?
I'm a software developer and these startups are a dime a dozen nowadays.
Proof of stake still has the issue wealth begetting more wealth because of how putting down the stake to be a validator works. It does use a lot less power than bitcoin though I'm not sure how it compares to all the bank transactions used now.
Can people understand the concept that we can make things that are shit, and turn them into not shit?
It's called innovation.
Yes, but to motivate this people need to be made aware of how totally shit the thing is currently. Most people who come into contact with bad blockchain tech are not aware of the sheer shittyness. To do this, we must shit on it from a great height.
To be fair, at least some of Norway's power consumption comes from bitcoin mining.
Norway's main exports are Bitcoin and leftover Nazi gold stashes.
Bitcoin mining uses a lot of processing power, and the power needed just continues to increase as the volume of total bitcoin increases (this is by design as it is meant to stabilize the total volume). It is still profitable to run bitcoin mines as the prices are high.
Computers are set to solve problems to chain together blocks. I'm not an expert, so here is a link if you're interested.
Miners take bundles of transactions called blocks and attempt to add them to the network. To add them, the block requires a hash, a long number, that depends on all the bits in the block and the hashes of all the blocks that came before it (this ensures a consistent ledger of coins for all accounts across time). Finding this hash is computationally difficult, essentially plugging in numbers and checking over and over again till the right hash is found. The first miner that finds it broadcasts it to all the others. Generating the hash also gives the miner 10 bitcoins. The other miners then add the signed block to their own chain, and begin again on a new set of transactions. Mining gets easier or harder by all miners agreeing to a fixed number of 0s allowed in the hash (think if an 80 digit number has twenty 0s at the end, you have fewer numbers to check than if you didn't know those 20 digits were 0), changing that number every two weeks, dependent on the average time between each block of transactions.
To head off one question, the miner who finds the hash for the block adds new bitcoin for themselves (the reward) with a special transaction type that has no origin address, so it comes out of thin air. Then all the other miners, being honest, agree to respect that creation of new bitcoin when they add the block to their own chain.
Abstraction level 1:
By leaving a fairly intensive computer app running 24/7, it does math to (very inefficiently) process transactions in exchange for bitcoin, or bitcoin surrogates.
Abstraction level 0:
Idling gaming rigs to produce solved sudokus which can be traded for fentanyl
One of my 2020s decade predictions is that Bitcoin and digital currencies will cause widespread electrical brownouts and shortages. Just like they've caused GPU and silicon shortages.
The problem is that renewable sources are intermittent, but bitcoin mining requires uninterrupted processing and power supply. Thus the high demand on renewable sources must be supplemented with increased coal/fossil fuel power sources. Even if your premise were correct, how much rare-earth metal should we strip from the planet to facilitate production of magic internet coins? At this time in history we should be rejecting anything requiring such massive power consumption, returning so little human benefit.
