A reminder that this metric—number of new addresses—means nothing. Addresses should never be reused, so modern wallet software should be making new addresses with every transaction, no matter the nature of the transaction. And with blocks consistently full, the number of transactions doesn’t change much.
Addresses do frequently get reused, though- people send to the same addresses, and last time I checked, the bitcoin.com wallet defaulted to reusing receive addresses
The wallet is not open source (they made a private fork of bitpays wallet as part of their strategy to shill "bitcoin cash" a relatively worthless coin that cashes in on bitcoin.com's official sounding name)
FWIW the bitcoin.com wallet (and really bitcoin.com) is borderline malware. It exists solely to leverage its official sounding name to constantly nudge people towards deceiving people into buying "Bitcoin cash" which is largely unrelated to bitcoin. When ever they're called out for doing it too blatantly deceptively (e.g. spent months calling "bitcoin cash" the real bitcoin, and bitcoin "bitcoin core"), they just walk it back slight enough to not get outright banned on platforms.
It might be poor choice of words, but I think it gets the point across. It's barely worth more than "bitcoin SV" (another coin that shares the same transaction history with bitcoin to the same point) that's controlled by a painfully obvious and blatant scammer and his backer.
Bitcoin cash is more bitcoin than the current BTC is. It continues the idea of peer-to-peer cash, payments on the chain. Read the whitepaper. Where's BTC is being pushed into a strange, lot less useful, "store of value" niche.
The metric I'm watching is Google Trends[1]. So far it's hardly budged and is far below its peaks in 2017 and 2019. That indicates to me that this run up in price could be just beginning. I expect that if an all time high is reached then a wave of publicity will propel the price much higher, as it has several times in the past.
I don't see a 10x price increase like 2017 though. I expect less extreme price movements now that bitcoin's market cap is so much higher and more large investors are involved. I think it would take something huge to move the price that much, like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC.
Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1]
Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth.
What's misleading about this is that the electricity is not consumed per transaction. The amount of electricity miners buy is proportional only to the block reward, which is fixed, plus transaction fees, which are small, times the price. The block reward is large now but halves every 4 years and eventually rounds down to zero, so the electricity consumption of bitcoin will eventually fall with certainty.
Also, that guy is not Satoshi. Satoshi is almost certainly dead, and was probably Hal Finney.
your first paragraph is a round about restatement of the fact that it consumes exactly as much electricity and produces exactly as much waste as I said it did. Once block reward gets to zero, unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack, so poof. Rip.
Ok I provided a detailed article explaining why Paul Le Roux is probably Satoshi and you responded with nothing.
> unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack
Your $80 is based on the current block reward which was set totally arbitrarily and is not in any way an estimate of the actual amount necessary to prevent 51% attacks in the future after the block reward disappears.
Right but after the block reward goes away lol, you’re going to have to pony up or 51%, and until the block reward goes down in 1500 days it’s 100% fair to say what I did about what a transaction costs.
How much resources does it take to bring 1 kilo of gold out of the earth? You are saying it is wasteful without any comparison to something similar to bitcoin.
That's a false comparison. If gold miners were to stop digging, global finance would continue just fine (with some temporary shocks to commodities markets, but nothing permanent). If Bitcoin miners were to stop wasting electricity, the entire operation would immediately stop working.
Now imagine how wasteful physical currency is, the infrastructure to store it and transport it, the useless Chase/BOA/WellsFargo branches and ATMs that exist everywhere. They could almost all be replaced with digital wallets and apps.
The real cost of a fiat currency is not in printing bills or running ATMs. It's the law enforcement and ultimately military might required to enforce scarcity and value of the currency. The cost of enforcing scarcity in Bitcoin pales in comparison to the amount the US spends defending the dollar globally.
The army is a fixed and utterly irrelevant cost because in a world where bitcoin is the only currency, and I can't stress this enough, you still need an army lol.
Fun fact you can calculate for yourself that your argument carries no water. If you scale up Bitcoin to just what visa provides (not all cash, no MasterCard not the rest of the economic order) it would expend a few times more energy than the entire world produces today and produce a few times more ewaste than the entire world produces today. Therefore it cannot be by definition more efficient than traditional finance.
I think a lot of that energy would have otherwise been wasted (e.g. surplus power from times of the day or season), and I remember reading that the vast majority of it is at least renewable energy. At least it seems a lot better than assets too? Like take gold, people are happy spending up to the spot price in order to extract it from the earth, environmental damage be damned.
There’s no such thing as free magical wasted energy that just happens to only be good for Bitcoin mining lol, there’s plenty of other things that can be done with it. Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. Socialized across block reward in the form of inflation.
When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
> Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price.
It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage.
Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin.
History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.
The cost to store gold is an empty building and a few kalashnikovs. That scales roughly constant.
The cost to store Bitcoin is the cost to secure the network, and its outrageous. Further it scales linearly with the price of Bitcoin as block reward value does.
Well, it’s a special kind of stupid to introduce renewable energy without using it to displace fossil fuels.
Science says we’re already pretty much fucked if we don’t go full-on panic mode, and here we are, still wasting this opportunity, if not to keep our feet dry, at least to keep our chin above water...
How many servers are powering banking mainframes, VISA and Mastercard services?
It's not wasteful if it's providing transactional security.
Just for perspective, there are THREE MILLION ATMs globally. And that's just ATMs, totally ignoring the infrastructure for the 60,000+ global banking institutions.
Well an easy way to know this makes no sense is that if you scaled up Bitcoin power consumption to visas current transaction volume it would require more power than the entire world produces and generate more e-waste than the entire world put together. Then multiplied a few times in both cases.
Great so let’s just dial it up! Easy! When does it take effect? Right yeah, it doesn’t, and it won’t for all the same reasons it hasn’t yet. Including ideological zealotry about how you should be able to download the entire blockchain onto a USB drive. Among many other reasons.
You misunderstood when I asked "when does it take effect" I meant when will they go ahead and make that change, then followed up with the assertion that they will not ever make that change and therefore this feature isn't particularly relevant.
No need to do any of that if people adopt a Layer-2 solution like Lightning.
Also, no one is happy about the energy consumption and the centralization of miners in China and subsidized dirty plants, which makes an eventual change to a Proof-of-Stake protocol likely as it matures.
When we get to that point, are you going to start using crypto or are you just going to find another reason to bash it?
Lightning is vaporware, it’s been coming for 5 years, it’s not coming. A layer 2 network does not require Bitcoin you can tie any asset to it. Gold works just fine.
Bitcoin is actively user hostile, has a worse wealth distribution than any banana republic, the majority of it is in the control of criminals and shady actors, no I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps. Currencies benefit from their ability to respond to shock, and to the addition of new market actors. Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth.
There’s literally nothing to like about crypto. Nothing. People deserve better than what you’re shilling.
> the majority of it is in the control of criminals and shady actors,
Crime, corruption and fight for power exists independently of what people use for currency. "Criminals and shady actors" also control significant amounts of paper money yet you are not here trying to argue against people to use paper money, right?
> I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps.
Are you living in North America or the Euro zone? Then you are already top dog, dude.
> Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth
Do the existing inflationary policies are helping out in reducing inequality? Who were the greatest beneficiaries of these recent stimulus packages, QE, etc?
> There’s literally nothing to like about crypto.
I'm pretty sure there are, you just don't want to acknowledge it. But most importantly, the question that I pose to every perennial-crypto-critic: Do you think that the status quo is the best that we can do? If yes, have you stopped to look at all the existing issues with the global financial system and can you honestly make a case that they are all insurmountable problems? If no, do you accept that we need to have people experimenting with alternatives?
The wealthiest people in crypto are all criminals down to satoshi who is likely Paul Le Roux.
“If you’re living in North America or the euro zone you’re probably top dog”
What? I’m saying that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin is owned by a small cluster of criminals and everyone else has to fight for scraps of the chain. Those people aren’t who should be wealthy in the new world order. That’s not better than the existing system, it’s worse, and we deserve better.
“Do existing financial policies help reduce inequality”
It requires a combination of fiscal and monetary policy but I do know that moving to deflationary strictly makes the problem worse by rewarding people who sit on money and don’t move it.
I reiterate there’s nothing to like about crypto. It’s all hot garbage. Is the existing system better? 100 times yes. Is the existing system perfect? Lord no. But I don’t think we should replace it with something strictly worse for the sake of a change. We all saw how 2016 played out. I’m in no rush to 2016 our money.
I don't want get into a technical argument here, because clearly you are arguing with the amygdala now.
The one thing that I'd like to point out is that most of your arguments are either exclusive to Bitcoin (not crypto) and/or a social-economic-political issue that has nothing to do with the technology of crypto or blockchain.
Take your speculation of the identity of Satoshi. Let's say it's Le Roux. So what? First, he is in jail, which is more that we can say about a lot of other Criminal Lords. Second, having a bitcoin stash does not get him out of there. Third, even if you pull the "he can use his stash to order bad things to happen" argument you know that the same thing would be true if he was in control of a gold stash or a Swiss account. Lastly, even if managed to get out and managed to prove that he was Satoshi, he would not be a leader of a "new world order" were his ethics and morality would suddenly be glorified.
Also, you confusing Bitcoin with crypto leads to the interesting position where you sound both as a Bitcoin maxi and a Buttcoiner. Case in point: if you are right about "small cluster of criminals owning a lot of Bitcoin", there will be no need to "fight for scraps of the chain". What will happen is simply is that those will start using another chain. When Tether does go out in flames (which I am with you and I hope they do as soon as possible), Ethereum will go on. Fuck, even if you are against ETH you can still use ETC, so where is the part that people are being forced to adopt one chain over another?
To sum up: don't throw the baby with the bathwater. It's not because Bitcoin at this point in time has a lot of issues that crypto/blockchain should be considered "all hot garbage". Your attitude is reactionary and leaves no room for any kind of change.
Seems like Ethereum may be a much better bargain right now. It's trending upwards as well over the past few months, but is even less of a % of its 2017 peak price compared to Bitcoin.
This is a contradiction - if the number of transactions isn’t increasing, and mew addresses are created from every transaction, then the number of mew addresses shouldn’t be increasing.
So something most be changing - either wallet software is preferring to use new addresses more often, or something else, like more distinct users.
The metric is: "The number of unique addresses that appeared for the first time in a transaction of the native coin [sic] in the network."
They're not excluding old, never-reused addresses, so the number of addresses is always increasing as every transaction adds more.
What they tweeted was that this rate of increase has itself increased by about 20%. Since blocks have been full during this period, this means the difference lies in the type of the transaction. If the current transactions are more of a fan-out (pay multiple parties) and less consolidation (sweeping payments made to the same institution), then that makes sense.
And indeed, right now there is a larger than usual outflow from exchanges. Maybe people are getting nervous about holding increasingly more valuable bitcoin on exchanges and are pulling their funds off? That alone could explain a 20% increase in this meaningless "address count" metric.
yeah I'm sure Paypal and/or Paxos put their rep on the line by lying to their customers' faces.
>Technology: Paxos Crypto Brokerage provides crypto custody and trading for PayPal. Our APIs allow PayPal to offer crypto services seamlessly within the PayPal app with its simple and intuitive user experience.
lol the narrative of “institutional buying” has been beaten to death for about 5 years now, time to let it go. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the manipulative buying. Square bought $50mm of Bitcoin. Tether prints $2B fake dollars per month.
These aren’t institutional buyers. Its a few bucket shops and square. On the list square is the only one dumb enough to put their own money on the line, the rest are just holding an aggregate pile of other people’s poor life choices.
Through what mechanism would bots drive up the price? Are you claiming there are simplistic momentum bots out there with seemingly more cash than other bots that just buy up bitcoin causing it to rise, which causes them to buy more of it, ad nauseam?
For pump and dump schemes, aren't we past that stage for Bitcoin at least? Isn't Bitcoin too big and too "mainstream" to be pumped in some Telegraph channel? Maybe you can clarify what pump-and-dump strategy you think is being used here?
You'd need a lot of resources for pumping right now. Or maybe it's already happened quite a few times and everybody is doing it now, sort of like a meme?
Billions of dollars of new Tether ($2B per month, $18B total now and counting) being printed with no backing bank account and used to buy Bitcoin, triggering fomo buying at “legitimate” exchanges. I’d wager the NYAG would agree, their lawsuit certainly points in this direction.
I mean the $2B per month you can see on the coinmarketcap chart for Tether alongside the $18B total.
As for not having the money... [1] their own lawyers admitted in court they aren’t fully capitalized. At the time the article was written it has a measly $2.5B market cap (net of what the Fed’s seized, at least $350MM [2]). They had a bunch tied up in the separate scam that is Crypto Capital.
As for their banking relationship I believe after a few years of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’s proceeds of money laundering (Taiwan, Poland, among others) their most recent statement was that it was at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas who is clearly on the up and up [3,4]
Let me ask you, can you with a straight face tell me this is a company legitimately holding eighteen billion dollars? And that two BILLION dollars a month in new money is rolling in like clockwork for a year and a half?
The market cap of Tether affects tether, not bitcoin. Only when value flows from tether to bitcoin is when the former affects the latter (and this flow would make tether actually decrease its market cap, not increase it).
(NB: I'm not defending Tether, IMO there are way better stablecoins, like DAI, but I disagree about this bullrun being caused by it.)
To your point we can’t know for absolutely certain until the lawsuit resolves but studies do point in this direction.
“By mapping the blockchains of Bitcoin and Tether, we are able to establish that one large player on Bitfinex uses Tether to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin when prices are falling and following the printing of Tether. Such price supporting activities are successful as Bitcoin prices rise following the periods of intervention. Indeed, even 1% of the times with extreme exchange of Tether for Bitcoin have substantial aggregate price effects. The buying of Bitcoin with Tether also occurs more aggressively right below salient round‐number price thresholds where the price support might be most effective. Negative EOM price pressure on Bitcoin in months with large Tether issuance points to a month‐end need for dollar reserves for Tether, consistent with partial reserve backing. Our results are most consistent with the supply‐driven hypothesis.”
“Overall, our findings provide support for the view that price manipulation can have substantial distortive effects in cryptocurrencies. Prices in this market reflect much more than standard supply/demand and fundamental news. These distortive effects, when unwound, could have a considerable negative impact on cryptocurrency prices.”
They print tether, backed by nothing, which increases its market cap, and use it to buy Bitcoin which increases its price, which increases its market cap. Win-win! Haha. It’s like the accounting on arrested development — take a banana, take a buck.
The "economic uncertainty" sounds like something everyone would agree on. "Yes we are in uncertain times right now". Then again, at any point in time, there would be agreement that economy is in uncertain times. It is a meaningless argument because in my opinion it is always true.
The price surge being news, and the news driving the price surge, IMHO.
Maisie Williams asked her 2.7M followers recently [1]: "should i go long on bitcoin"
Maybe that was a paid tweet, maybe not. 900k people answered in the poll still; and day after day it seems the mainstream is getting more and more exposed to it.
The mempool is pretty empty, transactions costs are very low at the moment. I think there was a brief spike in mempool usage and fees around the time paypal announced their bitcoin option, but that didn't last.
Ah, interesting. If bitcoin is adopted more and more transactions will come, will the problem return again (and perhaps not just as spike). Or is there some technological solution?
There isn’t a technical solution anyone in the community agrees on, and hadn’t in over 12 years. The only proposal is “layer 2” which is agnostic to the underlying asset and would function just as well with gold.
Think of it as gold. Almost nobody uses it as a currency. It's an investment whose value will hopefully rise, at which point you're just gonna convert it for a "real" currency.
Think of it as gold whose storage cost scales linearly with its market price. Instead of with whatever a warehouse and a few kalashnikovs costs. Block reward welfare reduction scales linearly with market price.
If you wanted to transfer 100k between two banks in, say, 1900 via $5000 bank notes, how much do you suppose it would have cost you? Based on that cost would you say the dollar was failing as a currency in 1900?
Sure there’s tons of options. TransferWise, for one. Wire transfers. InteractiveBrokers. And they’re actually quite affordable. This has been a solved problem for a long time.
Try doing that with Bitcoin lol, no merchants accept Bitcoin on either side and nobody gets paid in it so you have to convert dollars on one side to crypto for a 1-2% fee, transfer it for $10 fee to an exchange in the receiving country and then convert back to local units for a 1-2% fee.
Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull.
Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate.
This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars.
You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero.
I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do?
> Also, why. It makes no difference.
You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward.
Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
> Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull.
Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :)
I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of.
Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation.
Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics.
And that really knocks out the rest.
The reality is trust is a huge optimization.
Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day.
No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price.
> You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
There’s no such thing, we live in a society.
So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.
Let's make a tally of analysis based on current implementation instead of potential of the technology, shall we?
> backed by proof of waste
Already claiming that PoW is the only possible approach. Off to a good start.
> Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives.
The first electric light bulb was certainly less efficient than candles or oil lamps. The first airplanes could barely carry the pilot. Should we give up work on new technology simply because the current iteration is not better than the status quo? What a lame attitude.
> That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap.
You said it yourself. Market cap is a bullshit metric from the perspective of the technology. Irrelevant to the argument.
What is relevant is that a good number of these different currencies are trying different approaches to solve different problems, or trying to implement different financial models, different levels of centralizations/trust, and so on. For every aspect of Bitcoin that you criticized, there has been a different project that tries to overcome that. Yet, you completely ignore it just because it is easier to look at what is wrong in the present instead of working to fix things for the future.
> Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from
Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone.
> North Korea, ransomware, money laundering.
FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long?
Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away.
> Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics.
Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick!
> The reality is trust is a huge optimization.
Definitely! No serious person would challenge that. No serious person would also challenge that systems that are too optimized are more likely to fail in unpredictable ways and collapse after Black Swans.
This is why decentralization is important. It's not about efficiency, it's about hedging bets to improve our chance of surviving catastrophes.
> has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today
That's FOUR! This kid is on fire...
> There’s no such thing, we live in a society.
Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.
> Already claiming that PoW is the only possible approach. Off to a good start.
I didn't, I tackled the most prominent first.
> Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone.
I think you misunderstand. Many people put their time and energy into it because it's overwhelmingly a get-rich-quick scheme. If the price went down to $1/BTC you can bet your behind nobody would care at all anymore.
> FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long? Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away.
I do, which is why I believe in technology that can make the problem better instead of technology which surrenders to the criminals and walks away.
> Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick!
Sure, if you pretend there's some platonic ideal cryptocurrency that doesn't have any problems, and is perfectly efficient, why not? I'll be waiting for OP to deliver.
> FUD and bullshit.
Not if you decided to look for information. $2 billion dollars and counting as documented by a pro-crypto news source. [1]
That's the definition of permissionless. Many pro-crypto folks hold this up as an example of crypto working properly! "Why should we allow America decide who can and can't spend money! Iranians and North Koreans should be able to conduct commerce internationally too!"
> Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.
You misinterpreted. That expression implies we each live in our respective societies but that nobody is self-sufficient.
I was buying and selling BTC when they were less than $7. I have a wallet with multi-hundred BTC transactions and would make some newcomer cry thinking "how could he give this all away?". I will tell them that this mentality is backwards: if people were not willing to spend hundreds of BTC 7 years ago, it wouldn't have gone anywhere to the level it is today. I will continue to use it to buy whatever I can. If you find my discussions on various crypto subreddits, you will find me arguing that focusing on price of token X or project Y should be the last of people's concerns and to focus on how to make the tech more useful than the system it is trying to replace.
You may have a lot of people on the hodl camp, but a lot of people are like me - less worried about lambos and more focused on ensuring that we can create feasible alternatives to the status quo.
Yes, there will be a vast majority of people that are in it for the short-term gain. It doesn't matter. Every market needs to have speculators. I will still be focused on the long term.
I am not betting my life savings on it and I am not recommending anyone to do so. What I am telling people though is that crypto will be a fundamental part of how groups of people coordinate themselves and allocate their resources, and that the sooner they start getting acquainted to it the easier it will be when it is more mature for wider adoption.
> North Korea... $2 billion dollars and counting as documented by a pro-crypto news source.
I am aware of the story, this is not what I am calling FUD. What I am saying is that you are using crypto as a scapegoat. State-sponsored terrorists can cause damage regardless of them being financed by crypto, gold, oil or greenbacks.
Black markets were not invented with crypto. Money laundering is estimated to be between 800 billion to 2 trillion dollars. Those were the number before crypto, yet you make it sound like BTC, ETH, ZEC and Monero are the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. THAT is what I am calling FUD and BS.
> platonic ideal currency
I know it will never be perfect. No implementation of any system ever is. But the only way to have something better than the existing flawed solutions is to iterate, use it, test it in the real world and keep improving.
To make an analogy with Free Software: I know that is never going to be perfect or satisfy every use case, but its flaws are on the implementation side, not the principle. The more I use and the more I contribute to it, the less people get to be dependent on proprietary crap.
What you are saying is that people should not bother working on making a better Free Software Desktop because the current systems are not as "usable" as Apple and likely will never be. That is, quite frankly, a horrible way to live.
The point changes if you express the costs as a ratio of costs of equivalent offerings, versus absolute costs. A lot of things that would be super wasteful today look like a cakewalk compared to how things were done in 1900.
Do you know about visa/mastercard transaction fees? Someone has to do the work of performing the transaction and bitcoin achieves this with a functioning market - high fees -> high mining rewards -> more miners -> lower fees -> less miners -> loop back
I recommend learning more about the payments space before trying to reinvent it.
US interchange is about 1.8% and that’s largely returned to buyers in the form of reward programs. The remainder is split between profit and the cost to originate and service loans. This isn’t a bad deal, at all, as studies show merchants enjoy 20% larger ticket sizes and don’t have to fear theft of cash or scammers taking their crypto - while customers enjoy protections and rewards.
In Europe interchange is capped at 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit, so of course they Don’t have reward programs.
A Bitcoin transaction costs $10 in fees and $80 in electricity so you’d need an average ticket size of $30000 in Europe ($5000 in the US net of reward) to make BTC more efficient.
In what context? I've read some of the posts that you've made in this thread and at this point i'm almost certain that you either work for a bank or for a credit card provider. You are glowing.
Nope, I worked in fintech for years though, so have a solid understanding of the space
It’s not bad in the sense that merchants get larger average ticket sizes and avoid a lot of risks, customers get insurances and protections including chargebacks, the ability to defer and consolidate their cash flow via 1 month no interest loan.
I recommend learning more about the bitcoin payments space before trying to criticise it.
A bitcoin transaction does not cost $10 (https://mempool.space/graphs#1w). If you are going to add in your (completely made up?) estimate of mining costs to a bitcoin transaction you would need to include the costs of the entire fiat payments and settlement infrastructure to the costs of credit card transactions. From gold mined and stored by central banks all the way through to the energy used by the back offices of commercial banks all over the world.
At the time I posted this, the average fee was hovering between $8 and $14 per transaction, and so I picked a fairly generous, low average.
> If you are going to add in your (completely made up?) estimate of mining costs to a bitcoin transaction...
It's not made up, it's available for you to review and criticize here [1], with all the linked studies available to you. I specifically did not include the 700 kWh at a global average $0.14/kWh ($98) so as to avoid inviting this criticism.
> ...you would need to include the costs of the entire fiat payments and settlement infrastructure to the costs of credit card transactions. From gold mined and stored by central banks all the way through to the energy used by the back offices of commercial banks all over the world.
Without going through the process of estimating what it is, I can tell you what it isn't -- even close to the same order of magnitude as BTC. I know that because if I scaled up linearly the energy consumption and e-waste generation of BTC vs. just Visa it would require several times more energy than the entire world generates today, and would generate more e-waste than the entire world generates today.
It's wasteful, and it's shameful for people to defend it like this. Its energy usage is not comparable, at all, no matter what externalities you tried to bundle in. Now there might be a case to be made that the energy usage is worth it, but deflecting the energy usage criticism with hand-waving about including the calories exerted by gold miners swinging pick-axes under the earth is at best disingenuous.
More miners does not lower fees. Bitcoin users are competing with each other when bidding for the limited space in each bitcoin block. And the frequency at which blocks are generated is roughly constant by design.
Bitcoin is still called a currency because that's more or less what its creator called it in the seminal paper [1].
However, 10 years later, Bitcoin has proved to be a new kind of financial instrument, with extremely useful properties unmatched by any other kind of asset.
At this point, of all the things Bitcoin can do that other financial assets can't (pseudo-anonymous, extremely hard to confiscate, can be moved quasi instantaneously across borders, demonstrably finite supply, can be use as a settlement layer for large players, etc ...) the one aspect that I believe attracts people is "store of value".
Many people contest that last property citing high volatility, and they're correct if your window is less than 4 years. But for folks who play the long game, supply and demand tells a verycompelling story for Bitcoin.
Calling Bitcoin a "currency" at this point is essentially incorrect and just creates confusion.
Currencies are tangible, generally recognizable and agreed-upon value containers to be traded for goods and services.
Calling it anything else at this point, I'd contend, would likely be essentially incorrect of its own merits, and I do think trying to separate it out would create confusion as it really does no good at all.
It is certainly a special kind of currency, but no different than some of the other universal currencies that we've had in the past, really, at all.
You really don't think permissionless, programmable money has any utility?
And while Bitcoin may have some flaws, there are subsequent coins that solve most of its issues.
Think of any story where PayPal froze someone's assets because they didn't like the type of business or because they mistakenly thought it was suspicious activity.
Think of a system where you can invest your money in a share of land, a fraction of a house or a share in a fleet of a car-riding service without paying 10-20% of fees to realtors/brokers or other middlemen.
Think of ebay, but where you only pay for the product if the whole supply chain can provably demonstrate that no child labor was used. Bonus: no counterfeits.
Think of a community that can run its own credit cooperative without depending on any bank.
Think of the idea of being able to provide micro-credit for people in developing countries without worrying that your funds might end up in the hands of some corrupt tribal leader or siphoned out by some corrupt NGO board member.
That's what "permissionless, programmable money" is.
"Trustless" is not about solving anything. It's about enabling new interactions that do not require a central coordinator - aka, trusted party. That is it.
Of course you can have "trustless" systems that are malicious or potentially abused. No honest advocate would claim otherwise.
Programmable money sounds the worst. Because it’s final, irrevocable and written in software. Not a day goes by without a smart contract losing all the money in it. Most of the entire worlds Ethereum was lost in the DAO (remember that?) — it was so bad they had to make a whole new Ethereum and start over. I guess transactions are final for Grandma’s life savings but if it affects Vitalik, different rules apply. Just 3 days ago stablecoin OUSD lost all its money, $7M, and was reduced to begging scammers to please give it back. Same with hospitals getting hit with ransomware.
Permissionless just means it’s a haven for criminals and terrorists. North Korea has built up a sizeable stockpile of permissionless crypto. [1] this is the definition of the reason currency has permissions. So it doesn’t get used by hermit kingdoms to finance their nuclear weapons programs.
During the 2018 spike, there was a massive surge in interest in Bitcoin, which has been notably absent this year. However, since COVID hit the issuance of stablecoin Tether has been through the roof, going from $4B to $18B and counting printed.
Each Tether is supposed to represent $1 added to the crypto ecosystem. So here's the big question: if there's not much retail interest this time, where did that $14B come from? Or is it more likely that it didn't, and the Tether being used to buy BTC at ever-higher valuations isn't backed by anything?
We know tether has neither the bank account nor the backing money, as the NYAG lawsuit tells us. Tether doesn’t even have a banking relationship let alone a mattress big enough to hide eighteen billion dollars under lol
This is the classic emperor has no clothes situation. Nobody in crypto wants to expose them because the value of their own holdings will plummet to zero. And at $18B they’re basically too big to fail. As much as people pretend otherwise Tether and Bitfinex is defining the price of crypto, everything else is a rounding error.
I believe this is the latest update on the suit. [1]
They dropped the claim of being backed by cash and now openly admit it on their website that they are backed by "other assets", which is probably mostly bitcoin they buy with all that fake money they print, which in turn raises the price of bitcoin so their "reserves" go up on paper.
>Nobody in crypto wants to expose them because the value of their own holdings will plummet to zero
Gotta give it to them it's a pretty smart scheme. Print money out thin air and co-opt the whole crypto community to not question it as it'd crash everything.
Shouldn't the bitcoin price be higher on USDT shops like Bitfinex and Binance then, vs other exchanges? I'd expect USDT buying pressure to drive up the price, while elsewhere there would be selling pressure to get real USD out. Yet this doesn't seem to be the case.
My guess would be that the Usdt is somewhat backed, so you can exchange some amount of it for usd and as long as no one questions any of that arbitraging it across exchanges is basically free money. Once tether gets a bank run and it becomes obvious it's not fully backed, that spread will shoot up
On one hand, it doesn't add up, since the bitcoin network is not seeing any increased usage in the number of transactions and network congestion. The "mempool" size has been relatively low.
However, right now, Ethereum is responsible for a lot of the demand for BTC, and it moves a lot of it through its money protocols. There's currently almost $3 billion worth of BTC deposited to Ethereum in various forms. The most dominant one is "Wrapped BTC" which has been growing at a staggering rate. In one year, it added more than $2b worth of value. See the graph here https://defipulse.com/wbtc
I'm not in favour WBTC because it's custodial. Not your keys not your coins yadda yadda.. right? Still, it has its uses if you just want to farm some yields for a little bit of time on Defi, while staying in BTC.
Each time the issue of bitcoin comes up, I'm surprised at the number of bitcoin haters on a forum dedicated to hackers and tech lovers. A little less cynicism and a lot more research would be a good thing.
Bitcoin (and the wider body of crypto assets) has created huge global ecosystems and economies, minted millionaires and perhaps billionaires, advanced cryptography and blockchain technology, fundamentally changed the way we think about economic theory of money, pulled people around the world out of poverty, saved others from economic ruin, and caused a seismic shift in global politics. Yet, all some people can find to criticise about is is the electricity consumption.
Are there problems ? Yes. After all, bitcoin is a prototype technology and the industry is still largely unregulated.
Is there progress? Is the sum contribution of crypto positive ? Yes, For reasons given above.
Deal with it folks: bitcoin and cryptocurrency is here to stay you are just being luddites if you do not accept this.
I agree really - though I appreciate the cynicism more than you do I think. A large portion of the crypto space is raving loony, so it is a bit refreshing.
Plus I think hackernews is a little light on the hackers and a bit more heavy on the tech lovers. And those tech lovers are usually devs who want to make money and work within the system rather than dismantle it - as a hacker might.
Every wave of innovation is filled with loonies at inception. How crazy do you think the Wright brothers seemed, at least to some, in the early days of aviation ?
Take a look at what is happening in defi space (yes, bitcoin is defi too). The innovation there is stupendous.
It is amazing that twelve years after it changed the world, people are still questioning bitcoin.
Perhaps I came on a little strong about the fanatics. I do think it is worth trying to cull a very large search space with some heuristic to prevent you from searching forever. I do follow defi and I do know the genius and the impetus is there, but it is hard to deny there are a growing number of hacks and frauds too.
It changed, and I can’t stress this enough, literally nothing. If it disappeared overnight a few criminals would be poor, and nobody else would even notice. Nobody uses it for anything other than speculation and fraud. 1% of transactions are spending 90% speculation, 9% misc, I have the breakdown somewhere.
It changed the world about as much as the introduction of an index futures market.
you seem really uninformed about what is happening in this space. Just to name a few, incredible fast settlement with lending and yielding; Automatic Market Maker; Decentralized Exchange guaranteed with no wash trade, insolvency and max transparency, etc. Those defi projects are pretty much all killer apps. Hard to believe you have been in financial industry to not recognize those solid use cases and how they eliminate the middle man and premium paid for trust.
You want to find someone is believes in the technology but that does not want to go it get more adoption. You know that you are asking for an impossible argument, right?
If I tell you that thanks to Bitcoin I could move money between three different countries without paying conversion fees or that it was my work on Blockchain technology that has paid my bills for the past two years, would you start looking into it?
If I tell you that my current project can help, I don't know, people in Lebanon to escape their disastrous monetary policy and be in control of their own assets, would you give it a chance?
If I tell you that I switched my browser from Firefox to another that is using blockchain to build an alternative that can fight Surveillance Capitalism, would you take seriously only those who don't hold any of the token or would you prefer to listen to someone who has skin in the game?
By your standard, every source will be "biased". The question is then if there any point on the scales you see yourself that can actually make it tip over.
To answer your questions honestly, no to all of them.
Sending money across countries over the world for less cost is not worth the environmental cost to me.
I believe the problems in Lebanon can’t be solved with technology because I think trust / a culture can’t be solved with technology.
I believe your choice of browser does little in the context of the other 90% who is still on Facebook although I honestly have respect for your dedication and efforts.
I do want a sound justification for a new tech that is consuming the power of a small Europan country.
Another one with the fixed set mentality... let's go for another round.
> I do want a sound justification for a new tech that is consuming the power of a small Europan country.
The need to consume that much energy is not inherit to the tech. It is just an issue of the current implementation. No one is shrugging their shoulders and saying "it is what it is". What they are saying is "This is one of the many issues that we need to address and we are working towards a solution."
Do you know of any new technology that come into existence already free of issues and as efficient as physically possible? Me neither.
Also: should I assume that you don't fly anywhere? Don't buy anything from China? Only consumes local produce?
Is your concern with the environment guiding all your lifestyle choices or only those you don't care about?
> problems in Lebanon (...) can’t be solved with technology.
No, the tech does not solve anything by itself. The tech is just an instrument, and it is an instrument that can help people there to escape government measures that lead to mismanagement of resources and favoring bankers. The tech can allow smaller groups of people to be their own (their communities) banks and not having to rely on a centralized "too big to fail" system.
The instrument does not "solve" anything. But it allows people to change the scale of the problem. It's much easier to recover from many shocks spread around smaller entities than to recover from one Black Swan event that can wipe out everyone at once.
> I believe your choice of browser does little in the context of the other 90% who is still on Facebook although I honestly have respect for your dedication and efforts.
Again, the tech is not what is going to solve anything. Brave (the browser) and BAT are just instruments that we have at our disposal to affect the change that we want for our lives.
Quite frankly, are you the type of person that always waits everyone else to do something in order to think it is worthy doing? Must be horrible to live with such apathy.
> Do you know of any new technology that come into existence already free of issues and as efficient as physically possible? Me neither.
After 12 years of crypto and blockchain the tech has nothing to show for itself, but to facilitate crime and people chasing lambo money.
> Also: should I assume that you don't fly anywhere? Don't buy anything from China? Only consumes local produce?
Oh so predictable. I should warn people up front not to come up with whataboutism that just deflect valid criticism.
You can’t get away with theft by pointing at somebody else and cry “but but (s)he stole too!”.
> The instrument does not "solve" anything. But it allows people to change the scale of the problem.
It all reads like after the fact reasoning to me by people just chasing lambo money. Your story was never why all those firestarters bought mining rigs to consume 3KW 24/7.
But back to those poor countries: I would like to see (hypothetically) actual independent evidence of a positive impact of crypto for those people, but I am very skeptical
> Quite frankly, are you the type of person that always waits everyone else to do something in order to think it is worthy doing? Must be horrible to live with such apathy.
What remains is a weak ad hominem, I think I’m done now.
Anyway, I do wish you good luck, if I am proven wrong, that would be a good thing.
Twelve years of work is nothing if you put it in the right perspective. We are still in the 14-bis stage of human flight. To dismiss it entirely as something that "facilitates crime and people chasing lambo money", you are showing either ignorance or malice. It's no different than looking at early-stage internet and thinking "oh, it's only for porn and nerd who can't go out and talk to people in real life".
Re: PoW. It's not valid criticism if it's already acknowledged as a crucial point that needs and is getting work and continued attention. You insisting on this point is as much whataboutism as as the one I mirrored there.
> Your story was never why all those firestarters bought mining rigs to consume 3KW 24/7
Because that is a non-story. People will act on their self-interest and they had an opportunity to profit.
If you want to be upset/find fault about this story, perhaps you should look at the government that allows subsidized energy production and does not care about the externalities of it all. Then perhaps you will also understand the parallels with what I was talking about Lebanon. (Hint: tech that helps with decentralization and neutralizing the power of control held by big central entities)
> If I am proven wrong, that would be a good thing.
That's the funny part. No one cares about proving anything to you or any of the skeptics. People will continue to build and work on it and keep improving it. And then one day you will be using tech based on blockchain systems without even realizing and you still will be skeptical. And those working on still won't care about you.
We all immediately understood the benefits of the early internet. I was dying to get on it as soon as possible.
I know that early internet story is such a trope, I’ve seen it many times before, it’s telling that you fall for it.
Your story about the government is just another case of whataboutism, deflecting the critical gaze to other things.
And that last paragraph reads almost like a religious argument. You don’t have any actual evidence for yourself that this crypto stuff means anything, I read a lot of bias, wishful thinking and emotional investment.
I wrote the things that make it more than meaningful to work on it or to want to have it these tools available to myself and others. You dismissed those on the grounds on not being important to you.
You come with the comment of "Blockchain does not solve trust" like you're the only one who has figured that out. Not only it is a laughable notion [0], you make it sound like people should abandon everything and lose all hope. What do you want people to say: "Oh, Mr. Louwrentius said that all this work is kind of foolish and not important, so let's pack our stuff and go work at Big Co?" or "Yeah, tech itself is not going to solve social problems, but those societies that want to operate in certain ways will need to have specific technology to support them?"[1]
You point out a known and largely acknowledged issue with the current implementation, to which I respond "Yes, it is known and a lot of people are working on solutions to overcome that, and if you want you can take a look at how the progress at Proof-of-Stake is going." Your only answer is "Oh, 12 years and they haven't delivered anything of value yet." Do you see how non-sensical it is?
Bias, "emotional investment"? Yes, of course there is! Anyone working on something based on some form of idealism will keep their biases and will be emotionally invested on their work. But as long as this work is not violating any moral or ethical values, what is the problem? I'd rather have more people working on things they are also invested in, where they have more skin in the game than anyone else and that they can actually defend what they do for their work. The alternative is to spend your professional life as a corporate drone and perhaps (if they feel guilty about it) try to make it up by the occasional virtue-signaling hobby.
Trying to discredit people working on blockchain due to "bias" or "emotional investment" is a terrible mistake.
First because you think that the "emotional investment" is all there is to it. It's not. You would be fully right to argue if it was "a lot of wishful thinking" if the people were only talking about it and never implementing anything, or if the people never stopped to learn the lessons of failed projects, or if you saw those leading projects making promises but never delivering. It's easy to dismiss things when you are only pointing to the scammers and the crackpots, but if you actually bothered to listen to the people that are working on it, perhaps you'd find people way more grounded in reality than you are.
Second, it's a mistake to discredit their work because you are not giving any alternative. When you say "none of these issues you pointed out are really worthy", you are displaying your bias for the status quo.
Each time the issue of electronic voting comes up, I'm surprised at the number of electronic voting haters on a forum dedicated to hackers and tech lovers. Or, perhaps, all these cynics and experts actually have a point, given where they're coming from... shrug
151 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadThey are basically brothers who hate each other.
I don't see a 10x price increase like 2017 though. I expect less extreme price movements now that bitcoin's market cap is so much higher and more large investors are involved. I think it would take something huge to move the price that much, like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
For the sake of the children† and the diversity of the planet‡ let’s hope not, eh? I mean it’s just tremendously wasteful to generate Bitcoin.
I don’t mind it as a concept, I think it’s cool, but fuck me what a waste of energy.
† Have none, don’t care.
‡ This tho.
Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth.
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
Also, that guy is not Satoshi. Satoshi is almost certainly dead, and was probably Hal Finney.
Ok I provided a detailed article explaining why Paul Le Roux is probably Satoshi and you responded with nothing.
Your $80 is based on the current block reward which was set totally arbitrarily and is not in any way an estimate of the actual amount necessary to prevent 51% attacks in the future after the block reward disappears.
When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
Ha, no. Theres a thing called "security" and if you don't pay for it your gold evaporates or walks away.
It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage.
Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin.
History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.
The cost to store Bitcoin is the cost to secure the network, and its outrageous. Further it scales linearly with the price of Bitcoin as block reward value does.
Science says we’re already pretty much fucked if we don’t go full-on panic mode, and here we are, still wasting this opportunity, if not to keep our feet dry, at least to keep our chin above water...
It's not wasteful if it's providing transactional security.
Just for perspective, there are THREE MILLION ATMs globally. And that's just ATMs, totally ignoring the infrastructure for the 60,000+ global banking institutions.
Also, no one is happy about the energy consumption and the centralization of miners in China and subsidized dirty plants, which makes an eventual change to a Proof-of-Stake protocol likely as it matures.
When we get to that point, are you going to start using crypto or are you just going to find another reason to bash it?
Bitcoin is actively user hostile, has a worse wealth distribution than any banana republic, the majority of it is in the control of criminals and shady actors, no I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps. Currencies benefit from their ability to respond to shock, and to the addition of new market actors. Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth.
There’s literally nothing to like about crypto. Nothing. People deserve better than what you’re shilling.
Crime, corruption and fight for power exists independently of what people use for currency. "Criminals and shady actors" also control significant amounts of paper money yet you are not here trying to argue against people to use paper money, right?
> I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps.
Are you living in North America or the Euro zone? Then you are already top dog, dude.
> Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth
Do the existing inflationary policies are helping out in reducing inequality? Who were the greatest beneficiaries of these recent stimulus packages, QE, etc?
> There’s literally nothing to like about crypto.
I'm pretty sure there are, you just don't want to acknowledge it. But most importantly, the question that I pose to every perennial-crypto-critic: Do you think that the status quo is the best that we can do? If yes, have you stopped to look at all the existing issues with the global financial system and can you honestly make a case that they are all insurmountable problems? If no, do you accept that we need to have people experimenting with alternatives?
“If you’re living in North America or the euro zone you’re probably top dog”
What? I’m saying that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin is owned by a small cluster of criminals and everyone else has to fight for scraps of the chain. Those people aren’t who should be wealthy in the new world order. That’s not better than the existing system, it’s worse, and we deserve better.
“Do existing financial policies help reduce inequality”
It requires a combination of fiscal and monetary policy but I do know that moving to deflationary strictly makes the problem worse by rewarding people who sit on money and don’t move it.
I reiterate there’s nothing to like about crypto. It’s all hot garbage. Is the existing system better? 100 times yes. Is the existing system perfect? Lord no. But I don’t think we should replace it with something strictly worse for the sake of a change. We all saw how 2016 played out. I’m in no rush to 2016 our money.
The one thing that I'd like to point out is that most of your arguments are either exclusive to Bitcoin (not crypto) and/or a social-economic-political issue that has nothing to do with the technology of crypto or blockchain.
Take your speculation of the identity of Satoshi. Let's say it's Le Roux. So what? First, he is in jail, which is more that we can say about a lot of other Criminal Lords. Second, having a bitcoin stash does not get him out of there. Third, even if you pull the "he can use his stash to order bad things to happen" argument you know that the same thing would be true if he was in control of a gold stash or a Swiss account. Lastly, even if managed to get out and managed to prove that he was Satoshi, he would not be a leader of a "new world order" were his ethics and morality would suddenly be glorified.
Also, you confusing Bitcoin with crypto leads to the interesting position where you sound both as a Bitcoin maxi and a Buttcoiner. Case in point: if you are right about "small cluster of criminals owning a lot of Bitcoin", there will be no need to "fight for scraps of the chain". What will happen is simply is that those will start using another chain. When Tether does go out in flames (which I am with you and I hope they do as soon as possible), Ethereum will go on. Fuck, even if you are against ETH you can still use ETC, so where is the part that people are being forced to adopt one chain over another?
To sum up: don't throw the baby with the bathwater. It's not because Bitcoin at this point in time has a lot of issues that crypto/blockchain should be considered "all hot garbage". Your attitude is reactionary and leaves no room for any kind of change.
So something most be changing - either wallet software is preferring to use new addresses more often, or something else, like more distinct users.
They're not excluding old, never-reused addresses, so the number of addresses is always increasing as every transaction adds more.
What they tweeted was that this rate of increase has itself increased by about 20%. Since blocks have been full during this period, this means the difference lies in the type of the transaction. If the current transactions are more of a fan-out (pay multiple parties) and less consolidation (sweeping payments made to the same institution), then that makes sense.
And indeed, right now there is a larger than usual outflow from exchanges. Maybe people are getting nervous about holding increasingly more valuable bitcoin on exchanges and are pulling their funds off? That alone could explain a 20% increase in this meaningless "address count" metric.
What they sell is a security pegged on Bitcoin.
However, that means they have strictly no need to actually own the underlying. They're just playing the bookmaker game without ever having to payout.
It's therefore unclear that this affects the BTC markets at all.
Transfers and purchases will be enabled in the coming months.
Talk is cheap, and actually - in their case - lucrative.
Not your keys, not your coins.
>Technology: Paxos Crypto Brokerage provides crypto custody and trading for PayPal. Our APIs allow PayPal to offer crypto services seamlessly within the PayPal app with its simple and intuitive user experience.
https://www.paxos.com/paypal-paxos-bring-crypto-to-millions-...
Can anyone definitely put their finger on what's causing price rise a global market like crypto? no
Can they do this probabilistically? perhaps.
For pump and dump schemes, aren't we past that stage for Bitcoin at least? Isn't Bitcoin too big and too "mainstream" to be pumped in some Telegraph channel? Maybe you can clarify what pump-and-dump strategy you think is being used here?
As for not having the money... [1] their own lawyers admitted in court they aren’t fully capitalized. At the time the article was written it has a measly $2.5B market cap (net of what the Fed’s seized, at least $350MM [2]). They had a bunch tied up in the separate scam that is Crypto Capital.
As for their banking relationship I believe after a few years of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’s proceeds of money laundering (Taiwan, Poland, among others) their most recent statement was that it was at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas who is clearly on the up and up [3,4]
Let me ask you, can you with a straight face tell me this is a company legitimately holding eighteen billion dollars? And that two BILLION dollars a month in new money is rolling in like clockwork for a year and a half?
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrl...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/news/bitfinex...
[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-02/bank-tied...
(NB: I'm not defending Tether, IMO there are way better stablecoins, like DAI, but I disagree about this bullrun being caused by it.)
“By mapping the blockchains of Bitcoin and Tether, we are able to establish that one large player on Bitfinex uses Tether to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin when prices are falling and following the printing of Tether. Such price supporting activities are successful as Bitcoin prices rise following the periods of intervention. Indeed, even 1% of the times with extreme exchange of Tether for Bitcoin have substantial aggregate price effects. The buying of Bitcoin with Tether also occurs more aggressively right below salient round‐number price thresholds where the price support might be most effective. Negative EOM price pressure on Bitcoin in months with large Tether issuance points to a month‐end need for dollar reserves for Tether, consistent with partial reserve backing. Our results are most consistent with the supply‐driven hypothesis.”
“Overall, our findings provide support for the view that price manipulation can have substantial distortive effects in cryptocurrencies. Prices in this market reflect much more than standard supply/demand and fundamental news. These distortive effects, when unwound, could have a considerable negative impact on cryptocurrency prices.”
They print tether, backed by nothing, which increases its market cap, and use it to buy Bitcoin which increases its price, which increases its market cap. Win-win! Haha. It’s like the accounting on arrested development — take a banana, take a buck.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12903
Here is a Google Trend for "economic uncertainty", where nothing seems to have changed much except maybe little blip during Spring of 2020: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=economic...
Edit, found a link which actually does show heightened economic uncertainty: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USEPUINDXD perhaps contradicting myself.
Maisie Williams asked her 2.7M followers recently [1]: "should i go long on bitcoin"
Maybe that was a paid tweet, maybe not. 900k people answered in the poll still; and day after day it seems the mainstream is getting more and more exposed to it.
[1] https://twitter.com/Maisie_Williams/status/13287844990612234...
Doesn't this mean it's essentially failing in its goal to work as a currency? Why do people still buy it / believe in it?
Ah, now I understand the name "Lightning Network". Cheers!
It’s 2020 an ACH transfer costs in bulk about 1/10th of a cent and has no practical cap.
Also, why. It makes no difference.
Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate.
This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars.
You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero.
I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do?
> Also, why. It makes no difference.
You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward.
Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :)
I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of.
Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation.
Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics.
And that really knocks out the rest.
The reality is trust is a huge optimization.
Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day.
No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price.
> You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
There’s no such thing, we live in a society.
So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.
> backed by proof of waste
Already claiming that PoW is the only possible approach. Off to a good start.
> Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives.
The first electric light bulb was certainly less efficient than candles or oil lamps. The first airplanes could barely carry the pilot. Should we give up work on new technology simply because the current iteration is not better than the status quo? What a lame attitude.
> That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap.
You said it yourself. Market cap is a bullshit metric from the perspective of the technology. Irrelevant to the argument.
What is relevant is that a good number of these different currencies are trying different approaches to solve different problems, or trying to implement different financial models, different levels of centralizations/trust, and so on. For every aspect of Bitcoin that you criticized, there has been a different project that tries to overcome that. Yet, you completely ignore it just because it is easier to look at what is wrong in the present instead of working to fix things for the future.
> Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from
Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone.
> North Korea, ransomware, money laundering.
FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long?
Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away.
> Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics.
Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick!
> The reality is trust is a huge optimization.
Definitely! No serious person would challenge that. No serious person would also challenge that systems that are too optimized are more likely to fail in unpredictable ways and collapse after Black Swans.
This is why decentralization is important. It's not about efficiency, it's about hedging bets to improve our chance of surviving catastrophes.
> has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today
That's FOUR! This kid is on fire...
> There’s no such thing, we live in a society.
Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.
I didn't, I tackled the most prominent first.
> Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone.
I think you misunderstand. Many people put their time and energy into it because it's overwhelmingly a get-rich-quick scheme. If the price went down to $1/BTC you can bet your behind nobody would care at all anymore.
> FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long? Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away.
I do, which is why I believe in technology that can make the problem better instead of technology which surrenders to the criminals and walks away.
> Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick!
Sure, if you pretend there's some platonic ideal cryptocurrency that doesn't have any problems, and is perfectly efficient, why not? I'll be waiting for OP to deliver.
> FUD and bullshit.
Not if you decided to look for information. $2 billion dollars and counting as documented by a pro-crypto news source. [1]
That's the definition of permissionless. Many pro-crypto folks hold this up as an example of crypto working properly! "Why should we allow America decide who can and can't spend money! Iranians and North Koreans should be able to conduct commerce internationally too!"
> Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.
You misinterpreted. That expression implies we each live in our respective societies but that nobody is self-sufficient.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2020/10/09/north-korean-c...
You may have a lot of people on the hodl camp, but a lot of people are like me - less worried about lambos and more focused on ensuring that we can create feasible alternatives to the status quo.
Yes, there will be a vast majority of people that are in it for the short-term gain. It doesn't matter. Every market needs to have speculators. I will still be focused on the long term.
I am not betting my life savings on it and I am not recommending anyone to do so. What I am telling people though is that crypto will be a fundamental part of how groups of people coordinate themselves and allocate their resources, and that the sooner they start getting acquainted to it the easier it will be when it is more mature for wider adoption.
> North Korea... $2 billion dollars and counting as documented by a pro-crypto news source.
I am aware of the story, this is not what I am calling FUD. What I am saying is that you are using crypto as a scapegoat. State-sponsored terrorists can cause damage regardless of them being financed by crypto, gold, oil or greenbacks.
Black markets were not invented with crypto. Money laundering is estimated to be between 800 billion to 2 trillion dollars. Those were the number before crypto, yet you make it sound like BTC, ETH, ZEC and Monero are the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. THAT is what I am calling FUD and BS.
> platonic ideal currency
I know it will never be perfect. No implementation of any system ever is. But the only way to have something better than the existing flawed solutions is to iterate, use it, test it in the real world and keep improving.
To make an analogy with Free Software: I know that is never going to be perfect or satisfy every use case, but its flaws are on the implementation side, not the principle. The more I use and the more I contribute to it, the less people get to be dependent on proprietary crap.
What you are saying is that people should not bother working on making a better Free Software Desktop because the current systems are not as "usable" as Apple and likely will never be. That is, quite frankly, a horrible way to live.
US interchange is about 1.8% and that’s largely returned to buyers in the form of reward programs. The remainder is split between profit and the cost to originate and service loans. This isn’t a bad deal, at all, as studies show merchants enjoy 20% larger ticket sizes and don’t have to fear theft of cash or scammers taking their crypto - while customers enjoy protections and rewards.
In Europe interchange is capped at 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit, so of course they Don’t have reward programs.
A Bitcoin transaction costs $10 in fees and $80 in electricity so you’d need an average ticket size of $30000 in Europe ($5000 in the US net of reward) to make BTC more efficient.
In what context? I've read some of the posts that you've made in this thread and at this point i'm almost certain that you either work for a bank or for a credit card provider. You are glowing.
It’s not bad in the sense that merchants get larger average ticket sizes and avoid a lot of risks, customers get insurances and protections including chargebacks, the ability to defer and consolidate their cash flow via 1 month no interest loan.
A bitcoin transaction does not cost $10 (https://mempool.space/graphs#1w). If you are going to add in your (completely made up?) estimate of mining costs to a bitcoin transaction you would need to include the costs of the entire fiat payments and settlement infrastructure to the costs of credit card transactions. From gold mined and stored by central banks all the way through to the energy used by the back offices of commercial banks all over the world.
At the time I posted this, the average fee was hovering between $8 and $14 per transaction, and so I picked a fairly generous, low average.
> If you are going to add in your (completely made up?) estimate of mining costs to a bitcoin transaction...
It's not made up, it's available for you to review and criticize here [1], with all the linked studies available to you. I specifically did not include the 700 kWh at a global average $0.14/kWh ($98) so as to avoid inviting this criticism.
> ...you would need to include the costs of the entire fiat payments and settlement infrastructure to the costs of credit card transactions. From gold mined and stored by central banks all the way through to the energy used by the back offices of commercial banks all over the world.
Without going through the process of estimating what it is, I can tell you what it isn't -- even close to the same order of magnitude as BTC. I know that because if I scaled up linearly the energy consumption and e-waste generation of BTC vs. just Visa it would require several times more energy than the entire world generates today, and would generate more e-waste than the entire world generates today.
It's wasteful, and it's shameful for people to defend it like this. Its energy usage is not comparable, at all, no matter what externalities you tried to bundle in. Now there might be a case to be made that the energy usage is worth it, but deflecting the energy usage criticism with hand-waving about including the calories exerted by gold miners swinging pick-axes under the earth is at best disingenuous.
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
However, 10 years later, Bitcoin has proved to be a new kind of financial instrument, with extremely useful properties unmatched by any other kind of asset.
At this point, of all the things Bitcoin can do that other financial assets can't (pseudo-anonymous, extremely hard to confiscate, can be moved quasi instantaneously across borders, demonstrably finite supply, can be use as a settlement layer for large players, etc ...) the one aspect that I believe attracts people is "store of value".
Many people contest that last property citing high volatility, and they're correct if your window is less than 4 years. But for folks who play the long game, supply and demand tells a verycompelling story for Bitcoin.
Calling Bitcoin a "currency" at this point is essentially incorrect and just creates confusion.
[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Currencies are tangible, generally recognizable and agreed-upon value containers to be traded for goods and services.
Calling it anything else at this point, I'd contend, would likely be essentially incorrect of its own merits, and I do think trying to separate it out would create confusion as it really does no good at all.
It is certainly a special kind of currency, but no different than some of the other universal currencies that we've had in the past, really, at all.
Still, the energy waste because of mining is mind boggling. And what do our societies get back for it?
I can’t tell.
People have vague stories about ‘decentralized’ and boohoo government. Most of those stories are just excuses to gamble for lambo money.
Bitcoin does not add any value to society. It subtracts only, as far as I can tell.
It made Silk Road possible, but that doesn’t make a good case now, does it?
I’m sorry for all the people who are going to lose money in this thing again.
https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
Unfortunately, ycombinator has a stake in coinbase, if I'm not mistaken.
I can't imagine what kind of value that provides to our society.
Think of a system where you can invest your money in a share of land, a fraction of a house or a share in a fleet of a car-riding service without paying 10-20% of fees to realtors/brokers or other middlemen.
Think of ebay, but where you only pay for the product if the whole supply chain can provably demonstrate that no child labor was used. Bonus: no counterfeits.
Think of a community that can run its own credit cooperative without depending on any bank.
Think of the idea of being able to provide micro-credit for people in developing countries without worrying that your funds might end up in the hands of some corrupt tribal leader or siphoned out by some corrupt NGO board member.
That's what "permissionless, programmable money" is.
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-b...
"Trustless" is not about solving anything. It's about enabling new interactions that do not require a central coordinator - aka, trusted party. That is it.
Of course you can have "trustless" systems that are malicious or potentially abused. No honest advocate would claim otherwise.
The issue is that it is an illusion to think that trustless systems can exist at all.
To me, trustless is an oxymoron. There is always a step of trust. There is always vulnerability.
Permissionless just means it’s a haven for criminals and terrorists. North Korea has built up a sizeable stockpile of permissionless crypto. [1] this is the definition of the reason currency has permissions. So it doesn’t get used by hermit kingdoms to finance their nuclear weapons programs.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2020/0...
https://imgur.com/zxFmFUs
During the 2018 spike, there was a massive surge in interest in Bitcoin, which has been notably absent this year. However, since COVID hit the issuance of stablecoin Tether has been through the roof, going from $4B to $18B and counting printed.
Each Tether is supposed to represent $1 added to the crypto ecosystem. So here's the big question: if there's not much retail interest this time, where did that $14B come from? Or is it more likely that it didn't, and the Tether being used to buy BTC at ever-higher valuations isn't backed by anything?
This is the classic emperor has no clothes situation. Nobody in crypto wants to expose them because the value of their own holdings will plummet to zero. And at $18B they’re basically too big to fail. As much as people pretend otherwise Tether and Bitfinex is defining the price of crypto, everything else is a rounding error.
I believe this is the latest update on the suit. [1]
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/nyag-bfx-letter-hearing
Have a look at a sound USDC then - market cap $450mil in march --> $3bil now. Same underlying story.
>Nobody in crypto wants to expose them because the value of their own holdings will plummet to zero
Gotta give it to them it's a pretty smart scheme. Print money out thin air and co-opt the whole crypto community to not question it as it'd crash everything.
I do wonder how much longer that can continue.
https://bitcointreasuries.org/
My guess would be that the Usdt is somewhat backed, so you can exchange some amount of it for usd and as long as no one questions any of that arbitraging it across exchanges is basically free money. Once tether gets a bank run and it becomes obvious it's not fully backed, that spread will shoot up
However, right now, Ethereum is responsible for a lot of the demand for BTC, and it moves a lot of it through its money protocols. There's currently almost $3 billion worth of BTC deposited to Ethereum in various forms. The most dominant one is "Wrapped BTC" which has been growing at a staggering rate. In one year, it added more than $2b worth of value. See the graph here https://defipulse.com/wbtc
I'm not in favour WBTC because it's custodial. Not your keys not your coins yadda yadda.. right? Still, it has its uses if you just want to farm some yields for a little bit of time on Defi, while staying in BTC.
Bitcoin (and the wider body of crypto assets) has created huge global ecosystems and economies, minted millionaires and perhaps billionaires, advanced cryptography and blockchain technology, fundamentally changed the way we think about economic theory of money, pulled people around the world out of poverty, saved others from economic ruin, and caused a seismic shift in global politics. Yet, all some people can find to criticise about is is the electricity consumption.
Are there problems ? Yes. After all, bitcoin is a prototype technology and the industry is still largely unregulated. Is there progress? Is the sum contribution of crypto positive ? Yes, For reasons given above.
Deal with it folks: bitcoin and cryptocurrency is here to stay you are just being luddites if you do not accept this.
Plus I think hackernews is a little light on the hackers and a bit more heavy on the tech lovers. And those tech lovers are usually devs who want to make money and work within the system rather than dismantle it - as a hacker might.
Take a look at what is happening in defi space (yes, bitcoin is defi too). The innovation there is stupendous.
It is amazing that twelve years after it changed the world, people are still questioning bitcoin.
It changed the world about as much as the introduction of an index futures market.
Or to be frank: do you own Bitcoin and are you trying to (maybe even unconsciously) drum up demand with evidence free posts like this?
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
And please don’t point to biased sources with an interest in Crypto.
If I tell you that thanks to Bitcoin I could move money between three different countries without paying conversion fees or that it was my work on Blockchain technology that has paid my bills for the past two years, would you start looking into it?
If I tell you that my current project can help, I don't know, people in Lebanon to escape their disastrous monetary policy and be in control of their own assets, would you give it a chance?
If I tell you that I switched my browser from Firefox to another that is using blockchain to build an alternative that can fight Surveillance Capitalism, would you take seriously only those who don't hold any of the token or would you prefer to listen to someone who has skin in the game?
By your standard, every source will be "biased". The question is then if there any point on the scales you see yourself that can actually make it tip over.
Sending money across countries over the world for less cost is not worth the environmental cost to me.
I believe the problems in Lebanon can’t be solved with technology because I think trust / a culture can’t be solved with technology.
I believe your choice of browser does little in the context of the other 90% who is still on Facebook although I honestly have respect for your dedication and efforts.
I do want a sound justification for a new tech that is consuming the power of a small Europan country.
> I do want a sound justification for a new tech that is consuming the power of a small Europan country.
The need to consume that much energy is not inherit to the tech. It is just an issue of the current implementation. No one is shrugging their shoulders and saying "it is what it is". What they are saying is "This is one of the many issues that we need to address and we are working towards a solution."
Do you know of any new technology that come into existence already free of issues and as efficient as physically possible? Me neither.
Also: should I assume that you don't fly anywhere? Don't buy anything from China? Only consumes local produce?
Is your concern with the environment guiding all your lifestyle choices or only those you don't care about?
> problems in Lebanon (...) can’t be solved with technology.
No, the tech does not solve anything by itself. The tech is just an instrument, and it is an instrument that can help people there to escape government measures that lead to mismanagement of resources and favoring bankers. The tech can allow smaller groups of people to be their own (their communities) banks and not having to rely on a centralized "too big to fail" system.
The instrument does not "solve" anything. But it allows people to change the scale of the problem. It's much easier to recover from many shocks spread around smaller entities than to recover from one Black Swan event that can wipe out everyone at once.
> I believe your choice of browser does little in the context of the other 90% who is still on Facebook although I honestly have respect for your dedication and efforts.
Again, the tech is not what is going to solve anything. Brave (the browser) and BAT are just instruments that we have at our disposal to affect the change that we want for our lives.
Quite frankly, are you the type of person that always waits everyone else to do something in order to think it is worthy doing? Must be horrible to live with such apathy.
After 12 years of crypto and blockchain the tech has nothing to show for itself, but to facilitate crime and people chasing lambo money.
> Also: should I assume that you don't fly anywhere? Don't buy anything from China? Only consumes local produce?
Oh so predictable. I should warn people up front not to come up with whataboutism that just deflect valid criticism.
You can’t get away with theft by pointing at somebody else and cry “but but (s)he stole too!”.
> The instrument does not "solve" anything. But it allows people to change the scale of the problem.
It all reads like after the fact reasoning to me by people just chasing lambo money. Your story was never why all those firestarters bought mining rigs to consume 3KW 24/7.
But back to those poor countries: I would like to see (hypothetically) actual independent evidence of a positive impact of crypto for those people, but I am very skeptical
> Quite frankly, are you the type of person that always waits everyone else to do something in order to think it is worthy doing? Must be horrible to live with such apathy.
What remains is a weak ad hominem, I think I’m done now.
Anyway, I do wish you good luck, if I am proven wrong, that would be a good thing.
Re: PoW. It's not valid criticism if it's already acknowledged as a crucial point that needs and is getting work and continued attention. You insisting on this point is as much whataboutism as as the one I mirrored there.
> Your story was never why all those firestarters bought mining rigs to consume 3KW 24/7
Because that is a non-story. People will act on their self-interest and they had an opportunity to profit.
If you want to be upset/find fault about this story, perhaps you should look at the government that allows subsidized energy production and does not care about the externalities of it all. Then perhaps you will also understand the parallels with what I was talking about Lebanon. (Hint: tech that helps with decentralization and neutralizing the power of control held by big central entities)
> If I am proven wrong, that would be a good thing.
That's the funny part. No one cares about proving anything to you or any of the skeptics. People will continue to build and work on it and keep improving it. And then one day you will be using tech based on blockchain systems without even realizing and you still will be skeptical. And those working on still won't care about you.
We all immediately understood the benefits of the early internet. I was dying to get on it as soon as possible.
I know that early internet story is such a trope, I’ve seen it many times before, it’s telling that you fall for it.
Your story about the government is just another case of whataboutism, deflecting the critical gaze to other things.
And that last paragraph reads almost like a religious argument. You don’t have any actual evidence for yourself that this crypto stuff means anything, I read a lot of bias, wishful thinking and emotional investment.
You come with the comment of "Blockchain does not solve trust" like you're the only one who has figured that out. Not only it is a laughable notion [0], you make it sound like people should abandon everything and lose all hope. What do you want people to say: "Oh, Mr. Louwrentius said that all this work is kind of foolish and not important, so let's pack our stuff and go work at Big Co?" or "Yeah, tech itself is not going to solve social problems, but those societies that want to operate in certain ways will need to have specific technology to support them?"[1]
You point out a known and largely acknowledged issue with the current implementation, to which I respond "Yes, it is known and a lot of people are working on solutions to overcome that, and if you want you can take a look at how the progress at Proof-of-Stake is going." Your only answer is "Oh, 12 years and they haven't delivered anything of value yet." Do you see how non-sensical it is?
Bias, "emotional investment"? Yes, of course there is! Anyone working on something based on some form of idealism will keep their biases and will be emotionally invested on their work. But as long as this work is not violating any moral or ethical values, what is the problem? I'd rather have more people working on things they are also invested in, where they have more skin in the game than anyone else and that they can actually defend what they do for their work. The alternative is to spend your professional life as a corporate drone and perhaps (if they feel guilty about it) try to make it up by the occasional virtue-signaling hobby.
Trying to discredit people working on blockchain due to "bias" or "emotional investment" is a terrible mistake.
First because you think that the "emotional investment" is all there is to it. It's not. You would be fully right to argue if it was "a lot of wishful thinking" if the people were only talking about it and never implementing anything, or if the people never stopped to learn the lessons of failed projects, or if you saw those leading projects making promises but never delivering. It's easy to dismiss things when you are only pointing to the scammers and the crackpots, but if you actually bothered to listen to the people that are working on it, perhaps you'd find people way more grounded in reality than you are.
Second, it's a mistake to discredit their work because you are not giving any alternative. When you say "none of these issues you pointed out are really worthy", you are displaying your bias for the status quo.
[0]: https://twitter.com/rlullis/status/1307420668372430848
[1]: https://hub20.io and https://hub20.io/architecture/
The sad truth is - to me - that blockchain and crypto currencies don’t matter because they don’t solve a real problem people have.
https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...