To explain the derision, I don't think the GP makes a good point at all, as crypto-adherents pre-suppose that there's a common acceptance that blockchain currencies are an internet-level breakthrough.
Linked lists are useful. Merkle trees are useful. Blockchain currencies haven't so far proven a single use case they perform more usefully than existing systems.
All that the ICO craze, the NFT craze and the De-Fi craze point to is that this is a solution in search of a problem. The only reason any of the crypto-based versions of those existing concepts (IPOs, collectibles, credit) have been able to accrue funds so far is due to fraud and mania.
De-Fi could someday become useful if someone figures out a de-centralised way to handle unsecured credit, but how do you include trust in an eco-system that is based around a lack of trust? Even if someone solves that problem it won't be because of crypto, it'll be because of whatever novel idea they come up with to meet that specific need.
Anytime a bitcoin video ends up in my YouTube feed I feel like I'm being offered quantum physics lessons by Deepak Chopra.
Anyway, that's why I agree with the alchemy comment.
To set the record straight: I'm not even an "adherent" per-se, just a tech nerd who follows things closely. My point is that it's arrogant to claim to know the outcome of this grand experiment already. So many folks on both sides have already been so wrong so many times, yet hold firm to their ability to predict the future. Opinions are fine, but none of you are oracles.
Totally agree - I’m not making any predictions here.
All I’m saying is that it’s fine if people within that community believe this is as massive as they claim, but to have a common dialogue about it we would need to have common facts.
To adherents it’s bigger than the Internet, to others it’s a ponzi scheme built around linked lists and arbitrary hashes.
I don't think anyone seems to remember the slight drama under which satoshi nakamoto had disappeared where he called people out for not really seeming to realize or respect that bitcoin was pretty much just a proof of concept
I'm eager to see what ETH's transition to proof-of-stake does for its appeal and adoption. Environmental concerns seem to be one of Bitcoin's biggest problems of late (among many).
That's because browsers and phones do not disrupt the whole banking system and the way we think about money. There is a tremendous amount of push-back on cryptocurrencies coming from very influential places that stand a lot to lose.
Exactly. The concept of money is a shared belief ("fiction") that we all basically agree on. Bitcoin and crypto in general are shaking the foundations of these beliefs. I'm not even taking sides, just acknowledging that the cognitive dissonance is very, very real, and a barrier to the adoption of any paradigm-shifting technology.
It's pretty damn obvious once you objectively look at the shit show the fiat currency system has become.
It should be pretty obvious that people who work all of their lives can't retire with the money they've saved because their money loses (according to CPI) 2% per year.
Instead they have to risk their savings in the stock market or some other investment--remember savings, money markets, CDs return less than 1% interest; negative interest once you include inflation.
It just means that they can't retire solely on the money they get for having money in the first place.
With 2% inflation and a 1% money market, you're losing a net of 1% per year. If you were handed a million bucks at 25 and sat on it until 65, you'd still have an inflation-adjusted value of $669k.
That's not the difference between retirement and non-retirement. It's the difference between a luxurious retirement and a less-luxurious retirement, or a retirement at 70 rather than 65.
That money will continue to deflate, and if you live for another 40 years, it becomes a mere half-million at the end. That would give you $11k a year to live on -- not great, but again, you're talking about four decades of no work. That's a lot to ask.
That's not fun, of course, but it's not supposed to be fun. "I was handed a million dollars and therefore deserve to have it exponentially accumulate value for no work or risk" is fun, but it's not a fundamental right.
If you put earn more money than you need and stick it in the bank, you can retire. Inflation means that you need a little more money, which you can get either by working longer, or using your money to improve the economy as a whole by investment. More risk means bigger rewards. Zero risk means a net loss, as punishment for keeping your money out of circulation.
The point is that exponential growth is powerful, but even exponents of multiples of 10 don't do all that much when the base rate is 1%. It's only the difference between retirement and non-retirement for a relatively small sliver.
The real problem with non-retirement is that many people can't put away anything. They live hand-to-mouth for their entire careers, with every incoming dollar accounted for. For them, inflation isn't an issue because they have $0.
Worrying about inflation is a great privilege for those who have cash and would prefer it to become more cash for free, with no effort or risk. Instead, the economy demands they take risks rather than sitting on their money -- with the goal of some of it ending up in the form of jobs for those who don't have that cash sitting around.
Well... the utility of the web was evident pretty early on.
Gopher was released in 1991, the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) also in 1991, Mosaic in 1993. The first German online bookshop, Telebuch, went online in 1991 (via BTX), and was on the web in 1995; Bloomberg.com, IMDB, Wired was online 1993, Amazon was founded 1994, Google 1998, Napster 1999, Frienster 2002, MySpace 2003, Facebook 2004 - all within 13 years of the invention of the WWW.
It is now 13 years after the first release of Bitcoin, and what do we have (except dark web narcotics markets, and exchanges that take a cut around 50x greater than stock exchanges)?
Curious what fundamentals CCs bring to the table over traditional fiat, digital or physical. Because the downsides look brutal: difficult to understand, fragile, non-reversible (sometimes a pro but often a con), expensive to operate, volatile, incompatible with KYC (sometimes a pro but often a con), etc
The very clear and main thing it brings is getting rid of the middleman, at least for transactions, whether it be governments or businesses. This is a bigger deal than it sounds, as the middle man defines most policy around transactions, whether it be who can trade, when, and how, which creates huge imbalances in fairness and accessibility, and also can be enforced at nation state borders. These may be seen as cons by many, but to be frank, many find great value in these properties, and because it's a more efficient marketplace it will naturally take root.
Well, it doesn't. It replaces a fuzzy set of middleman with another.
And there isn't enough attention to the Bitcoin governance to make it better than the government-based system. Cryptocoin people don't even want to discuss governance, because they like to believe there's nothing to govern and nobody governing.
That isn't really a fair representation. The amount of leeway to affect policy and transactions on a blockchain by whomever you think these middlemen are is negligible compared to things like stocks and bank accounts.
No middle man can stop you from sending BTC to someone in Asia. No middleman can force your transaction to take 5 days. No middleman can stop your transaction. No middleman can stop transactions at night and weekends. No middleman can trade afterhours while you are stuck waiting until the next day.
Hum... Yeah, the different middleman come with different problems, not the same ones.
We don't have much clarity on what those new problems are (we know very few of them), but what is perfectly clear is that every interested party is actively avoiding creating some mechanism for solving them.
Just imagine if a gas station changed their prices to ounces instead of gallons and you filled up your gas tank for $3000 before you realized the scam. With no middle man that money is gone. With a credit card you can refuse the charge and tell the credit card company who will ban that seller from their network and not charge you.
The only transactions where a middle man are a problem for me is the government and taxes. I would like to be able to give someone money without reporting it to the IRS. I would like to be able to buy weed in the mail, but the government doesn't allow that. Crypto doesn't stop laws from existing.
People love to bring up Venezuela, but what happens when that government finds out someone has bought a house with crypto?
If you want an example, for why censorship resistance is useful, you can look back at 2011, when donations were stopped, to wikileaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes.
Crypto donations worked for them though. Bring up whatever thing that you want, about the problems, but at the end of the day, crypto donations worked for them, and visa didn't.
It is useful, to be able to make transactions to other people, in situations where banks, or credit card processors, attempt to block the transactions (even though no one has been charged with any crimes!)
I still don't see it: Money is trust in society remaining stable, condensed to (almost) physical form. That's how I can turn energy, resources and labour into money, because I can expect to turn it back into either of those things. If something happens to the value of the Euro and I'm not able to do that reliably anymore, it will be a symptom of a much larger dysfunction in my immediate surroundings than can be helped by holding some other currency, decentralized or not.
I also don't want it: Cryptocurrency is a new financial sector, and it will inevitably come with a new set of institutions, led by a new set of people. And instead of a group of fairly boring, fairly conservative central bankers whose main goal is preservation of the system underpinning current society, we will get some weird hodgepodge of libertarians extremists, run-of-the-mill grifters and Ponzi schemers, plus whatever set of state-sponsored actors whose ambitions are mostly geopolitical, rather than economic. And all even more beyond democratic institutional control than even the most detached 20th century investment banker would have dared dream of.
I am not a huge Bitcoin fan, and don't really have a strong opinion on it. It has some real problems, such as its energy usage, and slow transactions. All the technical complaints aside, which are legitimate, these news outlets write some of the worst pieces on Bitcoin. They are hopelessly biased in many cases and there are a lot of Bitcoin bears that eagerly celebrate its demise or anything negative around it. Sort of like all the folks that get giddy when Tesla stumbles. I think much more unbiased commentary I read recently was Bridgewater / Dalio's analysis: https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/our-though...
It is a very balanced take and Ray lays out the risks very clearly without all the breathlessness around volatility, etc.
Funny how people talk about the problem of Bitcoin using a lot of energy but then they live in a big house, drive an SUV, and fly to far away places on vacation.
Generalization much ? I live in 38 m^2 apartment and commute to office on cycle. Except for trip abroad always used Train and since Feb 2020 have not gone on any vacation due to Covid.
This is like dismissing Al Gore's climate advocacy because he flew private. It's perfectly possible to have a valid criticism of waste in one specific area even if you have unaddressed waste in your own life.
It's possible, it just makes the argument less relevant. Nobody will listen to a private jet setter preaching about the environmental impact of private jets.
A single bitcoin transaction uses roughly 707.6 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy–equivalent to the power consumed by an average U.S. household over 24 days, according to Digiconomist
And who is to blame for so few transactions fitting in a single block? What is the energy consumption of the petrodollar-backed wars in the middle east? Presenting numbers without discussing the alternative is sophistic misdirection.
Tell me more about how Bitcoin uses a reasonable amount of energy while it grows and scales to use exponentially more. My SUV/Vacation energy usage doesn't need to grow. I'm putting Bitcoin energy usage in context compared to daily life. You are the one who is misdirecting. "Whatabout!?" driving an SUV, that's bad amirite?
> Based on national averages in the U.S., the bitcoin network consumes as much power as approximately 6 million homes. Yeah, it is definitely a lot of power, but it is also what secures and backs the bitcoin network.
> Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy
Please come up with an algorithm for Bitcoin that does not use so much energy because if one exists, then Bitcoin wastes energy. I am certain that Bitcoin is not the crypto that will win in the long term if it sticks to PoW, so I probably don't need to waste my energy opposing it.
Pretty much. If bitcoin (or any cypto) can be a stable currency, I would jump on it. Otherwise, it is just a gambling tool at the moment. I don't gamble with things I don't understand (unless I am in Vegas and willing to lose a few bucks for fun). So it is a hard pass for me at the moment.
There are stablecoins on top of Ethereum. Some are backed by off-chain bank accounts, others are based on price feeds and on-chain derivatives over ETH.
In which case it's not a casino but a confidence trick. It depends whether you trust the issuer of the stablecoin and its backing to survive a bank run.
(Black Friday anyone?)
They could just disappear on you with your money, and you would be left with gas on a contract nobody wants anything to do with.
I spent .2btc to buy a $50 domain name at one point around 2013, that I only used for a year or something. Woooops. But hey, I figured, the future of money, let's do it! Oh well.
Well, this is baked into the limited number of transactions per second. At 10 transactions per second max, the usefulness as a day to day currency is inversely proportional to its popularity. Our favorite joke coin, DogeCoin, does 10 times better at 100/sec with faster blocks, but it’s still too slow. Visa is like 2000-100,000 transactions per second depending on if you use average or theoretical maximum. Anything which wants to be usable as a day to day currency of the future should shoot for either niche uses or should shoot for 10,000-100,000 transactions per second as a minimum. 1 million to be on the safe side.
Otherwise, the more popular it is, the less usable it is as a real currency. (As the transaction fees get bid up to higher levels if transaction throughput is limited.)
(Oh, and without a custodian, the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this. Maybe something like that will someday be usable but it sucks right now.... and it’s not obvious how these problems will be solved in a way that doesn’t introduce a whole bunch more game theory and/or technical/resource/usability constraints.)
It's not just the speed, it's also the fees. You ideally want something that has really minimal fees, so that you can send $.0001 without paying 10x that in fees. The ability to process micro-transactions cheaply and at scale could actually have the transforming affect that bitcoin was originally after.
But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.
Hmmm, working the other way, if your goal is to process 100k transactions / second, with each transaction being 1/100th of a cent and your transaction fees being 1/100th of that, your budget for operating your network would be, what, $3M / year?
The base layer of bitcoin is more of a settlement layer; Lightning Network and other layer 2 features allow for super fast and super cheap bitcoin payments.
Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments
without worrying about block confirmation times. Security
is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating
a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments.
Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of
transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows
away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude.
Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without
custodians.
Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the
Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which
allows for emerging use cases such as instant
micropayments.
You cannot argue that “Bitcoin is money” if, in order to do any of the money stuff, you need to add something that is explicitly “off chain.” Bitcoin itself plainly can’t do it and LN could just as well be a layer on top of anything else. It’s main purpose is to make Bitcoin seem like it could be useful some day.
And yet we’re years in and virtually no one uses LN as money despite lots of people having a vested interest in making it seem viable. I’m sure some people trade it back and forth but nobody is buying goods and services with it outside of as a gimmick.
You cannot argue that “Bitcoin is money” if, in order to do any of the money stuff, you need to add something that is explicitly “off chain.”
Bitcoin already does the money things as you call it, being able to send any amount of value to anyone else without requiring 3rd parties.
You can send $1 million worth of BTC anywhere in the world in minutes and the fee right this very minute is $5.94 for a high-priority transaction. But if you had any doubt of ensuring the transaction gets into the next block, you could easily start with a fee of $15, which is a trivial amount for a $1 million transaction.
But for use cases where the fees and speed are problematic—you might need to wait 10-15 minutes for a transaction confirmation—there's Lightning Network which clear instantly and the fees are fractions of pennies.
The "off-chain" comment is misleading; Lightning's payment channels require a base layer transaction to open and close them; it's the transactions that happen in the channel that aren't on the base layer because the entire world doesn't want to see every cup of coffee anyone of us purchases on a global immutable blockchain.
Once one of us (me or the other party in the payment channel) have decided to close the channel—like paying a tab at a bar—the end result of transactions hits the main bitcoin blockchain.
I'm finding it to be used a hell of a lot more in countries with precarious economies like where I've been spending most of my adult life. In brazil especially I've seen a lot of facilitation of adoption of crypto. I know because I've developed the systems myself, from everything to paying your phone bill to bus tickets, although bitcoin is hardly the only or best option for these things
Yeah for sure, without giving away too much PII on myself or advertising -- you don't see it on this page, but the company I had worked for can do cool stuff like load up a prepaid contactless mastercard on a wearable wristband with crypto you can just go and buy at a lottery ticket stand. I don't think that North America has solutions like this, but I worked on the integration myself and while I am not in that country anymore it was still impressive and something I wish I could easily use worldwide
Unfortunately most "investors" aka gamblers aren't pushing coins with the best tech, but rather the coins that are most deflationary (and using the tech as sexy marketing to hook people in). Unfortunately deflationary coins just encourages everyone to never spend on actual stuff, simply hold onto it till they can sell it off to some other investor.
People are looking forward to an economy that revolves around a deflationary/limited-supply currency like Bitcoin so, for example, excess housing supply doesn't get wasted for the sake of speculation/inflation-hedging. People looking to protect wealth would liquidate as many assets as possible for Bitcoin to achieve the maximum passive return and not hold underutilized assets on their balance sheet.
Have 3 houses and only live in 1? The fact that your houses are losing value in Bitcoin terms will push you to sell if wealth preservation is the goal.
I feel like I'm making the same comment on any of these articles, so I'll just post this one word from now on.
You can't buy drugs without bitcoin. A significant portion of all bitcoin transactions in the world are going to Russian drug marketplace Hydra. This forces bitcoin on many, many people who are not technology or finance enthusiasts, but just want to make a transaction.
This is patently false. It also doesn't even make sense to say. Bitcoin is not anonymous, I'm not sure how this misunderstanding stays alive considering that it's the exact opposite of that. All transactions and wallet ID's are stored in the blockchain forever.
Well, I guess it differs by country. I haven't heard of anyone meeting someone in person to buy drugs for about 5 years now. It something that doesn't happen around here anymore.
The initial idea and the ideology behind it is really admirable, but it was done as a proof of concept and failed terribly. But instead of "alright, PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better", too many people can't or don't want to move on because there's too much money on the line.
I find it personally exhausting - I had a coworker until recently (he left) who was a super nice guy but completely into the bitcoin-bullshit (with zero understanding of how it works, naturally). The fact that he made significant profits with it gave him the idea that he somehow is right about it.
The bitcoin bubble and all that goes with it can't burst soon enough.
Lots of people say "PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better," it's just that core Bitcoin devs and r/bitcoin mods kicked all those people out, so they've moved to other blockchains.
It's a lazer-eyed religion now, and I can't help but thinking the value of it's strongest adherents holdings is already zero - they'll never sell, under any circumstances, so any perceived value can never be realised.
(If it goes up, why would they sell? If it crashes, "it'll recover").
Under that logic, at no point is any amount of value stored in the scheme available to you in the future.
The market cap of all of these tokens is also incredibly misleading. Having no underlying value also means the market cap you're looking at is only a projection of the current point in time if there were indeterminate demand at the current trading price - meaning that in real terms the supposed money tied up in Bitcoin does not exist.
If stocks crash, you still have entitlement to profits from the company.
If bonds crash, you still have entitlement to payments from the issuer.
If a token crashes, you have a long alphanumeric number.
That's why if there's even a small amount of consolidation the market crashes by half or more.
It would be interesting to know the spread of who's left holding the bag, whether it'll be more heavily institutions or the latest adopters; if there will be a way to really find this out?
It's funny to me that you think its failed terribly, but it consistently grows year after year in adoption and value. The irony of this crowd especially having hindsight with the development of computers and the internet; being able to see what 90s internet looked like compared to today.
The Bitcoin network does exactly what it functionality sought out to do. The human speculative layer on top of it is what's confusing you, because the nature of monetary goods is confusing. Your dismissal of it shows your unfamiliarity with what money is, and your unwillingness to learn.
So much this. I thought it was a joke the first time I read about it and I still can't believe people(plenty of which work in the tech field too) are buying into it. One notable example is a guy who has been retiring "next year" since 2014 with cryptocurrencies.
> with zero understanding of how it works, naturally
Perhaps you don't understand it either, if you think it has failed.
"Few understand" is a meme and said tongue in cheek, but there's truth to it. To actually understand Bitcoin and crypto, you have to spend 100+ hours on it. Of course few put that kind of time in. Most default to either a blind acolyte or naysayer, depending on whether they got in early or not, or depending on what position is popular with their political tribe.
I find it remarkable that about half of the 14 articles that I see linked on the Bloomberg home page "above the fold" (in my browser window) are cryptocurrency-related.
It was never in any danger of becoming the future of money.
The entire power of a modern market democracy rests in the ability to control its currency. If you remove that power, the state itself has no legitimacy. Bitcoin was never ever going to be blessed as an alternative to the USD, no matter how much sense it made on paper.
Bitcoin is a pure sentiment asset. It rises when people think it should rise, and falls when people think it should fall. The value is neither reflective of productive work or a legitimate arbitrary power. It was and is a beanie-baby/baseball card economy and it will never be anything else.
> The entire power of a modern market democracy rests in the ability to control its currency.
State monopoly over money is a good thing or a bad thing?
> If you remove that power, the state itself has no legitimacy.
We've had "legitimate" states since the dawn of time, before fiat currencies. Many kings and republics ruled and minted coins, but they were always limited by what they had, and could not arbitrarily create more.
Fiat's main advantage is monetary policy, arguably the most powerful economic tool a country has. I highly doubt countries like China and the US will willingly give that up. The reason Bitcoin has survived so long is because outside the black market it is only used for speculation (at least, in any practical amounts). If a highly deflationary coin like Bitcoin became a currency, we'd be screwed and very vulnerable to what happened during the great depression with gold-backed money.
Go to the git repo on GitHub, check out the code, go to the first commit, and see how many times the word “Poker” is in the code base.
Bitcoin was simply designed to be an in game currency for a poker game, but the narrative has been co-opted by so many people that it’s become something else.
Look at this batch of function handlers[1]. Why does it have functions named "Deal Hand" "Fold" "Call" "Leave Table" etc... ?
This thing was clearly a poker game that was co-opted by a ton of narrative changes into what it is now. I'm not saying that the co-opting and narrative changes are bad because I think the underlying function of trestles digital uniqueness is brilliant, but looking at the code tells a different story than what a lot of people would have you believe.
When there’s a currency that has a fixed price and is cheaper than visa to transfer and is instant, I’ll be on board. Otherwise, what’s the point - other than making money?
I’d love to use a stable coin for micro transactions
I don't know that Bitcoin-as-in-BTC will be 'the future of money' by then, but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar.
Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people.
They are also volatile and slow energy-hogs, for the most part. The question is if those problems can be mitigated, and that strikes me as easier than fixing the bugs in government fiat money which I mentioned above.
BTC is a first mover, and has a lot of flaws relative to later entrants. It also has the bulk of the mind-share and stores the most value (for now). If they can add shielded transactions, and Lightning Network pays out, it can still win.
> but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar.
so not Bitcoin. Thats the authors point.
> Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people.
I agree. It is however getting harder and harder to get BTC without disclosing the full identity. Here in the Netherlands at least its super hard. This does indeed make certain use cases much more harder. It's not outright banning but I bet that more and more restrictions will come around it that only some smart asses will be able to bypass through (semi-)illegal moves.
If PoS works out at scale then PoW chains are probably toast. I don't know if that will happen, though, there's a self-licking lollipop aspect to the whole concept which has never set right with me.
I'm glad we're going to get to find out though. I think the entire discourse around energy use is misguided, but there's no question that using 2000 times less energy and equipment is both better for the environment and economically superior ceteris paribus.
The complete auditability of BTC is not to its credit, but Bitcoin is conservative, not completely static. Big blocks didn't get implemented (I agree with this decision) but Segwit 2x did. If BTC added ZK-SNARK shielded transactions, that would be a big win for privacy and anonymity.
That could easily happen in the next ten years. The winning network is more of a game theory problem than a technological one; we'll just have to wait, take such bets as we're comfortable taking, and see what happens.
Netherlands have one of the lowest capital gain taxes for Bitcoin, so there isn't any real need to hide it there.
I'm in Hungary where people preferred to move to other countries (like Malta at 0%) to realize their capital gains than to pay 28%, but finally the government decreases it to 15%, which is a fair deal between a country and its citisens.
I still don't understand this mindset of Bitcoin becoming the future of money. It isn't. It never was meant to be, and it never advertised itself as such.
Bitcoin solves the issue of trust. Bitocin itself will never work as a currency that governments can rely.
First reason for that is that governments want control over their money. There has to be a central authority for multiple reasons. Banks need bailing out? As much as I'm against bail-out, sometimes the damage of not bailing them can be far greater than not bailing them out. Need the £85k insurance that your money is safe in any bank?
Governments need control of their own currency. Bitcoin does not provide that.
I see Bitcoin more as a commodity. Something like gold, and just like gold, the supply must be finite. This is something Bitcoin provides.
There is nothing stopping a government from building their own cryptocurrency that they'll have control over, but that gets rid of the main selling point of Bitcoin, that is that you don't have to trust individuals (for the most part anyway).
If bitcoin truly solved the issue of trust there would be no need for all of the various intermediaries who have popped up to insert themselves into the transactions. Also, there wouldn’t be nearly as many scams.
In reality though, those intermediaries make use of Bitcoin easier. They are not a requirement. I can buy Bitcoin from individuals directly providing I can find one who wants something to trade for it and I have a way of delivering the goods. I can also send my Bitcoins to individuals without any intermediary. All I need is the official Bitcoin application on my computer. No need for any intermediaries.
Bitcoin is an interesting technology that was adopted by a bunch of people who spouse a crazy ideology. They believe that all financial problems we have are due to the specific currency used, namely paper-based currency controlled by a central bank. While I don't agree with all decisions made by the American currency creators, it is crazy to think that all financial issues would be solved by moving tomorrow to gold or bitcoins. This belief system is what made bitcoin popular along a certain segment of the population.
> It never was meant to be, and it never advertised itself as such.
Totally untrue. Read Satoshi's emails--it was in the title of his first email about Bitcoin, and the first sentence in the whitepaper! The current bitcoin core devs took over from Gavin who also shared the "cash" vision. They booted everyone with plans for making it cash, and censored or blocked everyone in the bitcoin subreddit who said anything about cash or large block sizes.
It really won't. It will make money obsolete if/when governments are okay with not having control of their currency. No sane government will do that, especially not the likes of the UK, US and EU.
>A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
Conclusion:
>We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.
So that's exactly what I said. Bitcoin solves the issue of trust. I do not have to trust that someone really has the money they say do, because Bitcoin will refuse to allow them to spend such money.
Seems to be unpopular but I agree.
If Bitcoin “wins” then what will it be denominated in? Will we go to the barter system? I just can’t see it replacing the USD. (Been in crypto since 2012)
Bitcoin crashed again! This time 55% in 35 days from $65k April 12th (Coinbase IPO) to $30k yesterday. It is as we speak only up 400,000,000% now from a penny a decade ago to $40k now. It will continue to fail and suck and destroy the environment at higher and higher prices. Proof of stake is already a proven successful replacement for Proof of work and saves the environment. This makes some people very angry though, because, well, uh, because they don't own any. Cryptocurrency is 99% scams. That 1% though. It really is changing the world. I'm a biased piece of trash founder in the space though, so don't listen to anything I say.
Richard J Schueler, it's true that you're a biased shill, but there are many other very legitimate reasons not to listen to anything you say, such as the fact that you falsely claim that proof of stake is a proven successful replacement for proof of work. And also the following reasons, based on your own words, that I will cite and link to, and the fact that you refuse to address them and answer simple straightforward questions, and repeat things like "Dodge, dodge" instead.
Confronting Richard Heart of HEX - SPAM KING and Crypto Scammer
>During the interview at ANON, Richard confirmed that he was one of the first people in the world to be sued for online spam, back in 2002. This shows us Richard has experience abusing unregulated markets, as he is doing with crypto these days.
Is this an accurate quote of your own words?
>When I pressed the matter and asked for a simple “yes” or “no” as to whether he, as the FOUNDER of HEX, knows who benefits from the funds sent to the “Origin Address” he flat-out said “I’m dodging your question.” Dodging the question! He proceeds to repeat “Dodge, dodge.”
Is your real name "Richard J Schueler", and is this true?
>Why HEX is a Ponzi and not a solid investment (Part 2): Richard Heart
>Legal and questionable events from Richard J Schueler:
>2002: Sued and won by Peacefire.org for violating Washingtons anti-spam laws, he was known at that time as the 'spam king' and made a lot of money off it - source. The Methuselah Foundation, for which Heart volunteered at that time, was committed to extending the human lifespan and “making 90 the new 50”.
>Questionable events in Panama: Several of Heart’s alleged aliases (James Hart, J. Richard, Richard Schueler) were named in connection with a Panamanian criminal network. Heart, called "CharityLover' at that time supposed cohorts included robbers, blackmailers and corrupt lawyers and judges, according to posts stemming from the now defunct Panama-Guide website . Miguel Antonio Bernal (Panama lawyer) described the process by which American criminals flooded Panama to “rob, cheat and blackmail local businessmen using Panama’s weak legal system'' in the linked post under ''Panama".
You're the same "Richard Heart" who won the "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New Scam" for "HEX", correct?
I don't follow Bitcoin's software development much, but to anyone familiar with the matter it should be clear that Bitcoin and it's community are rather conservative on "technological improvements".
But I've been surprised recently when I read that taproot had been merged into Bitcoin Core. An extension that's supposed to enable smart contracts.
I guess one day we'll see the fiat event of Bitcoin, when consuming energy will be removed from its algorithm. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
I keep running into the issue that blockchain seems to have very few legal uses that a centralized database isn't better for. Remittances seems to be the best use case with actual usage. But that doesn't really need anything. Every thing else seems like tech demos with no real world application or ways to do illegal things more efficiently.
Is there a use case someone really likes that blockchain seems like the best tool for the job?
I have no doubt that Bitcoin specialists are very smart people but they keep advocating a dumb-simple brute force algorithm to secure their money even after people state the obvious that it wastes vast amounts of electricity for very little benefit and a great deal of harm to the majority of humanity. Can they secure their Bitcoin with a smarter algorithm? Apparently not, because they are too busy being greedy and denying the truth.
Bitcoin is deflationary, and every modern economy is run on inflation.
Bitcoin is popular with the types who hold gold and are mad that the bag of cash under their mattress loses value every year.
Deflation is bad for economies, it incentives hoarding instead of spending. And oh look, bitcoin is primary hoarded, and at 10 TPS is definitely not optimized for spending.
It’s not going anywhere as a protocol, but as a speculative asset, its price could fall dramatically if it were to be abandoned.
We should hope that happens because it’s holding up progress. It’s like people are flying around in replicas of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. Sure, put it in a museum but don’t fly the thing.
the article actually says that it is a great tool for brave traders. Especially with the crazy up and down waves.
the article does not say bitcoin will disappear.
the article just claims that bitcoin is not the future of money, and makes some reasonable observations regarding this. especially that it is so easily manipulated by billionaires.
especially that it is so easily manipulated by billionaires.
Ironically the billionaire in question is Elon Musk, who's company bought $1.5 billion of BTC as a treasury reserve asset. Tesla sold 10% of its BTC after it appreciated in price to make it appear to be profitable, even though Tesla made more money selling BTC than it did from selling cars.
The price corrected because said billionaire tweeted stale energy FUD because he wants to make his company--who's cars plug-in to a grid powered by fossil fuels and who's batteries are made from rare earth minerals from 3rd world countries--appear to care about the environment. And make Tesla look like an appropriate recipient of energy tax credits.
It didn't help that his tweet coincided with the news that China is banning cryptocurrency for like the 10th time and the fed having to admit that with the highly manipulated CPI being something like 4.6% that inflation might actually be a thing.
So you keep on thinking Elon or any other billionaire can manipulate the price of BTC at his or her whim.
Many keep saying that BTC is like gold, an edge against inflation. I disagree. I think that one of fundamental problem with inflation is that banks pay almost zero interest rates, thus USD sitting in your bank account lose value overtime.
Now, what if banks were to offer decent interests rates? To at least compensate the inflation rate? Wouldn't that solve the "inflation" problem?
This is possible today with DeFi and stable crypto like USDT, platform like Celsius; where they pay you up to 10% interest rates on your $$$ sitting ducks.
Think about that for a second 10% !
If banks were not as greedy as they are and share more profits with their customers, inflation wouldn't be that big of a deal.
I truly hope that bitcoin is not the future. It is one of the most wasteful things that humans do in terms of computational power. We have huge amounts of energy wasted, causing environmental damage, basically to perform financial speculation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 77.5 ms ] threadedit: removed burn in all caps as this is not a Wendy's restaurant.
(And I think GP makes a good point.)
edit for context: parent originally started with “BURN!” before edit
To explain the derision, I don't think the GP makes a good point at all, as crypto-adherents pre-suppose that there's a common acceptance that blockchain currencies are an internet-level breakthrough.
Linked lists are useful. Merkle trees are useful. Blockchain currencies haven't so far proven a single use case they perform more usefully than existing systems.
All that the ICO craze, the NFT craze and the De-Fi craze point to is that this is a solution in search of a problem. The only reason any of the crypto-based versions of those existing concepts (IPOs, collectibles, credit) have been able to accrue funds so far is due to fraud and mania.
De-Fi could someday become useful if someone figures out a de-centralised way to handle unsecured credit, but how do you include trust in an eco-system that is based around a lack of trust? Even if someone solves that problem it won't be because of crypto, it'll be because of whatever novel idea they come up with to meet that specific need.
Anytime a bitcoin video ends up in my YouTube feed I feel like I'm being offered quantum physics lessons by Deepak Chopra.
Anyway, that's why I agree with the alchemy comment.
All I’m saying is that it’s fine if people within that community believe this is as massive as they claim, but to have a common dialogue about it we would need to have common facts.
To adherents it’s bigger than the Internet, to others it’s a ponzi scheme built around linked lists and arbitrary hashes.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/what-happened-when-bit...
This article seems to get into it if you want to read it all, let me know if you do so and find anything out, I only wish I had the time
Dear God no. Wake me when the "Firefox" of crypto is available.
Etherium seems like it could be one of those if POS or something else can make transactions a reasonable price
When Netscape Navigator was released, it was clear and obvious this was the future (and if anything, underpromised based on where we are today).
Within 4years of Navigators release, I was making my fulltime living building websites.
The iPhone was another immediate “this is obviously the future” technology.
13 years into Bitcoin, it’s still not obvious.
It's pretty damn obvious once you objectively look at the shit show the fiat currency system has become.
It should be pretty obvious that people who work all of their lives can't retire with the money they've saved because their money loses (according to CPI) 2% per year.
Instead they have to risk their savings in the stock market or some other investment--remember savings, money markets, CDs return less than 1% interest; negative interest once you include inflation.
"Bitcoin is the Great Definancialization"—https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-the-great-defi...
With 2% inflation and a 1% money market, you're losing a net of 1% per year. If you were handed a million bucks at 25 and sat on it until 65, you'd still have an inflation-adjusted value of $669k.
That's not the difference between retirement and non-retirement. It's the difference between a luxurious retirement and a less-luxurious retirement, or a retirement at 70 rather than 65.
That money will continue to deflate, and if you live for another 40 years, it becomes a mere half-million at the end. That would give you $11k a year to live on -- not great, but again, you're talking about four decades of no work. That's a lot to ask.
That's not fun, of course, but it's not supposed to be fun. "I was handed a million dollars and therefore deserve to have it exponentially accumulate value for no work or risk" is fun, but it's not a fundamental right.
If you put earn more money than you need and stick it in the bank, you can retire. Inflation means that you need a little more money, which you can get either by working longer, or using your money to improve the economy as a whole by investment. More risk means bigger rewards. Zero risk means a net loss, as punishment for keeping your money out of circulation.
The point is that exponential growth is powerful, but even exponents of multiples of 10 don't do all that much when the base rate is 1%. It's only the difference between retirement and non-retirement for a relatively small sliver.
The real problem with non-retirement is that many people can't put away anything. They live hand-to-mouth for their entire careers, with every incoming dollar accounted for. For them, inflation isn't an issue because they have $0.
Worrying about inflation is a great privilege for those who have cash and would prefer it to become more cash for free, with no effort or risk. Instead, the economy demands they take risks rather than sitting on their money -- with the goal of some of it ending up in the form of jobs for those who don't have that cash sitting around.
Gopher was released in 1991, the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) also in 1991, Mosaic in 1993. The first German online bookshop, Telebuch, went online in 1991 (via BTX), and was on the web in 1995; Bloomberg.com, IMDB, Wired was online 1993, Amazon was founded 1994, Google 1998, Napster 1999, Frienster 2002, MySpace 2003, Facebook 2004 - all within 13 years of the invention of the WWW.
It is now 13 years after the first release of Bitcoin, and what do we have (except dark web narcotics markets, and exchanges that take a cut around 50x greater than stock exchanges)?
And there isn't enough attention to the Bitcoin governance to make it better than the government-based system. Cryptocoin people don't even want to discuss governance, because they like to believe there's nothing to govern and nobody governing.
No middle man can stop you from sending BTC to someone in Asia. No middleman can force your transaction to take 5 days. No middleman can stop your transaction. No middleman can stop transactions at night and weekends. No middleman can trade afterhours while you are stuck waiting until the next day.
We don't have much clarity on what those new problems are (we know very few of them), but what is perfectly clear is that every interested party is actively avoiding creating some mechanism for solving them.
Just imagine if a gas station changed their prices to ounces instead of gallons and you filled up your gas tank for $3000 before you realized the scam. With no middle man that money is gone. With a credit card you can refuse the charge and tell the credit card company who will ban that seller from their network and not charge you.
People love to bring up Venezuela, but what happens when that government finds out someone has bought a house with crypto?
If you want an example, for why censorship resistance is useful, you can look back at 2011, when donations were stopped, to wikileaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes.
Crypto donations worked for them though. Bring up whatever thing that you want, about the problems, but at the end of the day, crypto donations worked for them, and visa didn't.
It is useful, to be able to make transactions to other people, in situations where banks, or credit card processors, attempt to block the transactions (even though no one has been charged with any crimes!)
I also don't want it: Cryptocurrency is a new financial sector, and it will inevitably come with a new set of institutions, led by a new set of people. And instead of a group of fairly boring, fairly conservative central bankers whose main goal is preservation of the system underpinning current society, we will get some weird hodgepodge of libertarians extremists, run-of-the-mill grifters and Ponzi schemers, plus whatever set of state-sponsored actors whose ambitions are mostly geopolitical, rather than economic. And all even more beyond democratic institutional control than even the most detached 20th century investment banker would have dared dream of.
It is a very balanced take and Ray lays out the risks very clearly without all the breathlessness around volatility, etc.
It's biased because it's an opinion piece, but do you have an actual counter to that main concern?
Your life style is the problem, not crypto.
Can I critize bit coin ?
Not strictly necessary and sometimes extravagant but they are not just burning energy for nothing.
When a some one points out a problem, if it turns out person is a hypocrite, that does not make the problem vanish in a puff of smoke.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/03/09/bil...
I think you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence, there.
> Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy
Please come up with an algorithm for Bitcoin that does not use so much energy because if one exists, then Bitcoin wastes energy. I am certain that Bitcoin is not the crypto that will win in the long term if it sticks to PoW, so I probably don't need to waste my energy opposing it.
I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then.
But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.
They could just disappear on you with your money, and you would be left with gas on a contract nobody wants anything to do with.
I hope he hung onto it!
Otherwise, the more popular it is, the less usable it is as a real currency. (As the transaction fees get bid up to higher levels if transaction throughput is limited.)
(Oh, and without a custodian, the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this. Maybe something like that will someday be usable but it sucks right now.... and it’s not obvious how these problems will be solved in a way that doesn’t introduce a whole bunch more game theory and/or technical/resource/usability constraints.)
This + micropayments, (i.e. negligible fees so it makes sense to send 0.01USD to someone, every day, or w/e.
I believe we have now reached the point where more time has passed since the Lightning whitepaper than between the Bitcoin and Lightning whitepapers.
But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.
http://lightning.network
2. There are over 10,000 lightning nodes with nearly $70 million in liquidity where payments occur everyday: https://1ml.com/
And yet we’re years in and virtually no one uses LN as money despite lots of people having a vested interest in making it seem viable. I’m sure some people trade it back and forth but nobody is buying goods and services with it outside of as a gimmick.
Bitcoin already does the money things as you call it, being able to send any amount of value to anyone else without requiring 3rd parties.
You can send $1 million worth of BTC anywhere in the world in minutes and the fee right this very minute is $5.94 for a high-priority transaction. But if you had any doubt of ensuring the transaction gets into the next block, you could easily start with a fee of $15, which is a trivial amount for a $1 million transaction.
But for use cases where the fees and speed are problematic—you might need to wait 10-15 minutes for a transaction confirmation—there's Lightning Network which clear instantly and the fees are fractions of pennies.
The "off-chain" comment is misleading; Lightning's payment channels require a base layer transaction to open and close them; it's the transactions that happen in the channel that aren't on the base layer because the entire world doesn't want to see every cup of coffee anyone of us purchases on a global immutable blockchain.
Once one of us (me or the other party in the payment channel) have decided to close the channel—like paying a tab at a bar—the end result of transactions hits the main bitcoin blockchain.
https://atarpay.com/
I think my favorite explanation of latin america is like 'yeah its kind of cyberpunk these days just more horizontal than vertical'
ah ok here's a video of someone doing this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtAcRonh8dU [ - ATAR BAND, Pagamento rápido e fácil do banco amigo das criptomoedas !!! ]
One whose value fluctuates wildly over time, one that is lost if you lose your keys, one that is susceptible to a hacker stealing your keys, etc.
Have 3 houses and only live in 1? The fact that your houses are losing value in Bitcoin terms will push you to sell if wealth preservation is the goal.
I feel like I'm making the same comment on any of these articles, so I'll just post this one word from now on.
You can't buy drugs without bitcoin. A significant portion of all bitcoin transactions in the world are going to Russian drug marketplace Hydra. This forces bitcoin on many, many people who are not technology or finance enthusiasts, but just want to make a transaction.
This is patently false. It also doesn't even make sense to say. Bitcoin is not anonymous, I'm not sure how this misunderstanding stays alive considering that it's the exact opposite of that. All transactions and wallet ID's are stored in the blockchain forever.
The initial idea and the ideology behind it is really admirable, but it was done as a proof of concept and failed terribly. But instead of "alright, PoC done, does not scale, let's move on to something better", too many people can't or don't want to move on because there's too much money on the line.
I find it personally exhausting - I had a coworker until recently (he left) who was a super nice guy but completely into the bitcoin-bullshit (with zero understanding of how it works, naturally). The fact that he made significant profits with it gave him the idea that he somehow is right about it.
The bitcoin bubble and all that goes with it can't burst soon enough.
It's a lazer-eyed religion now, and I can't help but thinking the value of it's strongest adherents holdings is already zero - they'll never sell, under any circumstances, so any perceived value can never be realised.
(If it goes up, why would they sell? If it crashes, "it'll recover").
Under that logic, at no point is any amount of value stored in the scheme available to you in the future.
The market cap of all of these tokens is also incredibly misleading. Having no underlying value also means the market cap you're looking at is only a projection of the current point in time if there were indeterminate demand at the current trading price - meaning that in real terms the supposed money tied up in Bitcoin does not exist.
If stocks crash, you still have entitlement to profits from the company. If bonds crash, you still have entitlement to payments from the issuer. If a token crashes, you have a long alphanumeric number.
That's why if there's even a small amount of consolidation the market crashes by half or more.
The Bitcoin network does exactly what it functionality sought out to do. The human speculative layer on top of it is what's confusing you, because the nature of monetary goods is confusing. Your dismissal of it shows your unfamiliarity with what money is, and your unwillingness to learn.
If only everything would fail this badly everyone on this board would be a billionaire…
Perhaps you don't understand it either, if you think it has failed.
"Few understand" is a meme and said tongue in cheek, but there's truth to it. To actually understand Bitcoin and crypto, you have to spend 100+ hours on it. Of course few put that kind of time in. Most default to either a blind acolyte or naysayer, depending on whether they got in early or not, or depending on what position is popular with their political tribe.
The entire power of a modern market democracy rests in the ability to control its currency. If you remove that power, the state itself has no legitimacy. Bitcoin was never ever going to be blessed as an alternative to the USD, no matter how much sense it made on paper.
Bitcoin is a pure sentiment asset. It rises when people think it should rise, and falls when people think it should fall. The value is neither reflective of productive work or a legitimate arbitrary power. It was and is a beanie-baby/baseball card economy and it will never be anything else.
State monopoly over money is a good thing or a bad thing?
> If you remove that power, the state itself has no legitimacy.
We've had "legitimate" states since the dawn of time, before fiat currencies. Many kings and republics ruled and minted coins, but they were always limited by what they had, and could not arbitrarily create more.
But a deflationary asset has utility, and ironically central banks will want to hold it as a reserve asset. They'll just be the last ones to do so.
Bitcoin can be destroyed, cheaply. It isn't the government-proof asset you think it is.
How do you "destroy" Bitcoin?
Bitcoin was simply designed to be an in game currency for a poker game, but the narrative has been co-opted by so many people that it’s become something else.
In the original-bitcoin repo I've found CPokerLobbyDialogBase class [2]. So I can partially confirm your theory.
According to bitcoin.com in the early stages of the project there was an idea for implementing on-chain poker game [3].
> Bitcoin was simply designed to be an in game currency for a poker game
Could you back this theory with some evidence?
[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/4405b78d6059e536c3...
[2]: https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99...
[3]: https://news.bitcoin.com/satoshis-pre-release-bitcoin-code-c...
This thing was clearly a poker game that was co-opted by a ton of narrative changes into what it is now. I'm not saying that the co-opting and narrative changes are bad because I think the underlying function of trestles digital uniqueness is brilliant, but looking at the code tells a different story than what a lot of people would have you believe.
[1] - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/4405b78d6059e536c369...
I’d love to use a stable coin for micro transactions
(At least in the UK bank to bank transfers are free and instant for consumers anyway)
Let's check back in ten years.
I don't know that Bitcoin-as-in-BTC will be 'the future of money' by then, but I would bet that money will continue to look more like Bitcoin than it does like today's dollar.
Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people.
They are also volatile and slow energy-hogs, for the most part. The question is if those problems can be mitigated, and that strikes me as easier than fixing the bugs in government fiat money which I mentioned above.
BTC is a first mover, and has a lot of flaws relative to later entrants. It also has the bulk of the mind-share and stores the most value (for now). If they can add shielded transactions, and Lightning Network pays out, it can still win.
so not Bitcoin. Thats the authors point.
> Like it or not, and I know a lot of you don't, cryptocurrencies aren't censorable (governments can't stop you from sending or receiving them), are hard to seize, and can't just be inflated away from storing value. These are attractive properties to a lot of people.
I agree. It is however getting harder and harder to get BTC without disclosing the full identity. Here in the Netherlands at least its super hard. This does indeed make certain use cases much more harder. It's not outright banning but I bet that more and more restrictions will come around it that only some smart asses will be able to bypass through (semi-)illegal moves.
So not necessarily Bitcoin, is my point.
If PoS works out at scale then PoW chains are probably toast. I don't know if that will happen, though, there's a self-licking lollipop aspect to the whole concept which has never set right with me.
I'm glad we're going to get to find out though. I think the entire discourse around energy use is misguided, but there's no question that using 2000 times less energy and equipment is both better for the environment and economically superior ceteris paribus.
The complete auditability of BTC is not to its credit, but Bitcoin is conservative, not completely static. Big blocks didn't get implemented (I agree with this decision) but Segwit 2x did. If BTC added ZK-SNARK shielded transactions, that would be a big win for privacy and anonymity.
That could easily happen in the next ten years. The winning network is more of a game theory problem than a technological one; we'll just have to wait, take such bets as we're comfortable taking, and see what happens.
I'm in Hungary where people preferred to move to other countries (like Malta at 0%) to realize their capital gains than to pay 28%, but finally the government decreases it to 15%, which is a fair deal between a country and its citisens.
Bitcoin solves the issue of trust. Bitocin itself will never work as a currency that governments can rely.
First reason for that is that governments want control over their money. There has to be a central authority for multiple reasons. Banks need bailing out? As much as I'm against bail-out, sometimes the damage of not bailing them can be far greater than not bailing them out. Need the £85k insurance that your money is safe in any bank?
Governments need control of their own currency. Bitcoin does not provide that.
I see Bitcoin more as a commodity. Something like gold, and just like gold, the supply must be finite. This is something Bitcoin provides.
There is nothing stopping a government from building their own cryptocurrency that they'll have control over, but that gets rid of the main selling point of Bitcoin, that is that you don't have to trust individuals (for the most part anyway).
Totally untrue. Read Satoshi's emails--it was in the title of his first email about Bitcoin, and the first sentence in the whitepaper! The current bitcoin core devs took over from Gavin who also shared the "cash" vision. They booted everyone with plans for making it cash, and censored or blocked everyone in the bitcoin subreddit who said anything about cash or large block sizes.
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October...
Abstract:
>A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
Conclusion:
>We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.
[0]: https://www.coinbase.com/bitcoin.pdf
Confronting Richard Heart of HEX - SPAM KING and Crypto Scammer
https://www.cointelligence.com/content/confronting-richard-h...
So will you again confirm what the article claims you already confirmed?
>Richard Heart was sued for spamming in 2002 under WA state law. Source:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/peacefire-org-beats-spammers-i...
>During the interview at ANON, Richard confirmed that he was one of the first people in the world to be sued for online spam, back in 2002. This shows us Richard has experience abusing unregulated markets, as he is doing with crypto these days.
Is this an accurate quote of your own words?
>When I pressed the matter and asked for a simple “yes” or “no” as to whether he, as the FOUNDER of HEX, knows who benefits from the funds sent to the “Origin Address” he flat-out said “I’m dodging your question.” Dodging the question! He proceeds to repeat “Dodge, dodge.”
Is your real name "Richard J Schueler", and is this true?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kwhjxa/why_...
>Why HEX is a Ponzi and not a solid investment (Part 2): Richard Heart
>Legal and questionable events from Richard J Schueler:
>2002: Sued and won by Peacefire.org for violating Washingtons anti-spam laws, he was known at that time as the 'spam king' and made a lot of money off it - source. The Methuselah Foundation, for which Heart volunteered at that time, was committed to extending the human lifespan and “making 90 the new 50”.
>Questionable events in Panama: Several of Heart’s alleged aliases (James Hart, J. Richard, Richard Schueler) were named in connection with a Panamanian criminal network. Heart, called "CharityLover' at that time supposed cohorts included robbers, blackmailers and corrupt lawyers and judges, according to posts stemming from the now defunct Panama-Guide website . Miguel Antonio Bernal (Panama lawyer) described the process by which American criminals flooded Panama to “rob, cheat and blackmail local businessmen using Panama’s weak legal system'' in the linked post under ''Panama".
You're the same "Richard Heart" who won the "Golden Pump Award" for "Best New Scam" for "HEX", correct?
https://twitter.com/JuanSGalt/status/1233242355995750400
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=857&v=tf-lJu5iDh...
But I've been surprised recently when I read that taproot had been merged into Bitcoin Core. An extension that's supposed to enable smart contracts.
I guess one day we'll see the fiat event of Bitcoin, when consuming energy will be removed from its algorithm. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Is there a use case someone really likes that blockchain seems like the best tool for the job?
Bitcoin needs to die. The useful parts can get incorporated into cryptocurrencies that are actually used as currencies and not for hoarding.
Bitcoin is popular with the types who hold gold and are mad that the bag of cash under their mattress loses value every year.
Deflation is bad for economies, it incentives hoarding instead of spending. And oh look, bitcoin is primary hoarded, and at 10 TPS is definitely not optimized for spending.
Like nearly all mainstream articles, this one is quite shortsighted.
It’s like saying the TCP/IP protocol has failed in the early 90s when there were many competitors that were more popular.
I’m old enough to remember when you had to install a TCP/IP as an add-on to Mac OS and Windows.
Let’s look back at this article when Fidelity’s bitcoin ETF is approved later this year…
We should hope that happens because it’s holding up progress. It’s like people are flying around in replicas of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. Sure, put it in a museum but don’t fly the thing.
the article does not say bitcoin will disappear.
the article just claims that bitcoin is not the future of money, and makes some reasonable observations regarding this. especially that it is so easily manipulated by billionaires.
so I think your point is m00t.
Ironically the billionaire in question is Elon Musk, who's company bought $1.5 billion of BTC as a treasury reserve asset. Tesla sold 10% of its BTC after it appreciated in price to make it appear to be profitable, even though Tesla made more money selling BTC than it did from selling cars.
The price corrected because said billionaire tweeted stale energy FUD because he wants to make his company--who's cars plug-in to a grid powered by fossil fuels and who's batteries are made from rare earth minerals from 3rd world countries--appear to care about the environment. And make Tesla look like an appropriate recipient of energy tax credits.
It didn't help that his tweet coincided with the news that China is banning cryptocurrency for like the 10th time and the fed having to admit that with the highly manipulated CPI being something like 4.6% that inflation might actually be a thing.
So you keep on thinking Elon or any other billionaire can manipulate the price of BTC at his or her whim.
Now, what if banks were to offer decent interests rates? To at least compensate the inflation rate? Wouldn't that solve the "inflation" problem?
This is possible today with DeFi and stable crypto like USDT, platform like Celsius; where they pay you up to 10% interest rates on your $$$ sitting ducks. Think about that for a second 10% !
If banks were not as greedy as they are and share more profits with their customers, inflation wouldn't be that big of a deal.