And yet in the modern world there's tens of them. There was no single winner, and why would we want one? I've never heard anyone advocate for merging VisaNet with the Mastercard network with the Discover network with the UnionPay network with the Swift network with the EFTPOS network with the Interac network.
In layered systems, there's a hierarchy of layers. Bitcoin is a layer 1 money protocol. Visa is level 8 (not literally), i.e. it is built on top of layers upon layers, which are built on top of US dollar and even that might not be the base layer yet. If we were in a gold standard, gold would be the base layer for US dollar, and the systems on top of it.
Layered systems tend to naturally converge into a single base layer, and the higher layers are more sprawling and dynamic.
> The similarities between the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the Bitcoin Protocol are almost too perfect.
Except maybe for the fact that HTTP was not looking for an actual, legal, constructive use-case that it solved better than existing technologies say... more than a decade after its creation?
It literally doesn't have a single use case, and its narrative changes every 2 weeks as the previous one is invalidated. Remember when it was an inflation hedge but then it collapsed 70% during the single most inflationary period in decades? Haven't heard that narrative in a while now. It's a religion, a political movement, and a high-beta way to speculate on USD liquidity in the global financial system - not a technology. The cult of the extremely inefficient linked list.
Like all cryptocurrencies, it has a hugely relevant use case, namely speculation without regulations. The fees for anonymous money transfers at huge costs are also tolerable for large scale criminal networks.
I don't know a use case for Bitcoin that benefits society per se, but there are definitely use cases for it.
Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money.
Every single one of them would be better off with USDC than Bitcoin, and thats the point. Not to mention as soon as anyone starts to use it the fees explode to exceed the per-capita GDP of several of the poorest nations.
The whole 'privilege' angle is drivel and prevents us from actually exploring solutions to the problem instead of pumping the specific bags of the person making the argument.
That's the real problem: cryptocurrencies solve the problem that rich people in first-world countries under permissive governments claim to have but don't (help! they're oppressing me!) - while claiming to solve the problems that poor people actually being repressed have, albeit very ineffectively.
That gives the advocates a cudgel to whack critics with. Only first-world folks are in a position to lose 70% of the purchasing power of their money in a few weeks - or 10% yesterday - and pay the GDP per Capita of Burundi ($265) in transaction fees when things get congested.
That guy who fled with $2000 in Bitcoin from the Ukraine now has $1100 in Bitcoin - it was trading at $40,000 on the day that article was published in mid-March. He lost half of his family's entire net worth (!?!) - but had he held USDC he'd have checks notes $2000. But you're for some reason holding this up as a success and telling me to check my privilege?
Every one of those articles, everyone interviewed is down bad compared to the publication date.
You're calling me privileged for not wanting a fleeing Ukrainian to lose half his entire net worth? I'd suggest you check your financial privilege fam. How dare you, tbh.
That entire list of articles is a graveyard if you look at the price of the espoused cryptocurrency at the time of writing: every one of them got rekt. Every last one.
> The layer that was—and still is—responsible for standardized text transfer on top of TCP/IP: HTTP
Um, wait. HTTP is for transferring documents. There are other text-based protocols that run over TCP, that long pre-date HTTP. And I for one deplore the use of HTTP for everything; I'm afraid the common firewall practice of blocking everything outbound except port 80 is probably largely responsible.
If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure.
If HTTP represents documents as text, then the "hypertext" part of the name becomes misleading, because you can't put hyperlinks in plain text. That is: the protocol is misnamed, because the leading "HT" stands for "Hypertext", not "Hyper Text". It's designed to transfer HTML.
> If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure.
Original HTTP (now called 0.9) did not have headers in the request. HTTP 1.0 added headers, including the "Content-Type" header (reused from the MIME e-mail standard), specifying the type of the data being transferred. Before that, all data was indeed implied to be HTML and nothing else.
This is a pseudointellectual treatise that advocates for financial privacy by effectively taking all your transactions, publishing them online under a pseudonym, emailing them to every global law enforcement agency and saying "bet you can't figure out who I am!"
Bet you they can.
The idea that a glacial L1, so slow that it would require 75 years to onboard everyone onto the L2 (and the better part of a trillion dollars of electricity), that publicly publishes all transactions for the FBI and the PRC to feed into their automated de-anonmyization tooling is somehow a panacea for privacy - because the author is three punchbowls deep in the Koolaid - I mean I have no idea where to even begin. It beggars belief.
Then they have the gall to mention Hong Kong as though every bit of traffic in and out of the island isn't going through the microscope of the PRC. If you think you can transact under the nose of the PRC on Bitcoin and they'll have no idea what's happening, I've got tokenized ownership of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge [1] to sell you. Those transactions are prosecution futures. They know exactly what they were for, they were letting you make them, and if you're a dissident, look out.
Physical, offline cash is the only true decentralized, censorship resistant peer-to-peer payment method that's difficult to trace. If you believe in privacy, let's throw some weight behind Rohan Grey's ecash. [2]
I don't get it: Bitcoin and privacy are by definition orthoginally separated. Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, they're public and can be traced quickly and easily. You're one public key leak away from having your entire banking history leak to the public. You can work around this problem by having different wallets for every transaction, but getting the coins in there would be a huge hassle if you have to buy them physically, with cash, every time you want to pay.
Bitcoin is uncontrollable by the government but that doesn't mean the government isn't following your every step on the blockchain. They'll let you play with your internet coins as long as you behave but if they've got it out for you, either because you're a criminal or because they're oppressive, you can't rely on the blockchain to protect you. Physical money in your wallet is far more private than any other common form of blockchain currency (which is why many countries are trying to limit how much physical cash you can have on you).
32 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 65.6 ms ] thread> Lightning Network Protocol (LNP) and the Bitcoin Protocol (BP) are often compared to TCP/IP.
Apparently LNP/BP is determined to be the be-all and end-all without further consideration?
[1] https://cryptofees.info
It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).
> It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).
Dergigi is a Bitcoin maximalist
Here's their book: 21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQ...
Like you can have the exact same text and replace BTC with XMR and it is equally valid, if not more.
Just like TCP/IP, there will be only a single winning protocol for money and value transfer.
This sounds like... centralization.
Layered systems tend to naturally converge into a single base layer, and the higher layers are more sprawling and dynamic.
Except maybe for the fact that HTTP was not looking for an actual, legal, constructive use-case that it solved better than existing technologies say... more than a decade after its creation?
I don't know a use case for Bitcoin that benefits society per se, but there are definitely use cases for it.
---
Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money.
Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono...
Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout...
Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...
Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
https://www.financialinclusion.tech/
The whole 'privilege' angle is drivel and prevents us from actually exploring solutions to the problem instead of pumping the specific bags of the person making the argument.
That's the real problem: cryptocurrencies solve the problem that rich people in first-world countries under permissive governments claim to have but don't (help! they're oppressing me!) - while claiming to solve the problems that poor people actually being repressed have, albeit very ineffectively.
That gives the advocates a cudgel to whack critics with. Only first-world folks are in a position to lose 70% of the purchasing power of their money in a few weeks - or 10% yesterday - and pay the GDP per Capita of Burundi ($265) in transaction fees when things get congested.
That guy who fled with $2000 in Bitcoin from the Ukraine now has $1100 in Bitcoin - it was trading at $40,000 on the day that article was published in mid-March. He lost half of his family's entire net worth (!?!) - but had he held USDC he'd have checks notes $2000. But you're for some reason holding this up as a success and telling me to check my privilege?
Every one of those articles, everyone interviewed is down bad compared to the publication date.
You're calling me privileged for not wanting a fleeing Ukrainian to lose half his entire net worth? I'd suggest you check your financial privilege fam. How dare you, tbh.
That entire list of articles is a graveyard if you look at the price of the espoused cryptocurrency at the time of writing: every one of them got rekt. Every last one.
Um, wait. HTTP is for transferring documents. There are other text-based protocols that run over TCP, that long pre-date HTTP. And I for one deplore the use of HTTP for everything; I'm afraid the common firewall practice of blocking everything outbound except port 80 is probably largely responsible.
It is literally in the name of the specification.
If it were meant to be a document transfer protocol, HDTP would have been a better acronym.
If HTTP represents documents as text, then the "hypertext" part of the name becomes misleading, because you can't put hyperlinks in plain text. That is: the protocol is misnamed, because the leading "HT" stands for "Hypertext", not "Hyper Text". It's designed to transfer HTML.
Also SOAP would be simple: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple
Bet you they can.
The idea that a glacial L1, so slow that it would require 75 years to onboard everyone onto the L2 (and the better part of a trillion dollars of electricity), that publicly publishes all transactions for the FBI and the PRC to feed into their automated de-anonmyization tooling is somehow a panacea for privacy - because the author is three punchbowls deep in the Koolaid - I mean I have no idea where to even begin. It beggars belief.
Then they have the gall to mention Hong Kong as though every bit of traffic in and out of the island isn't going through the microscope of the PRC. If you think you can transact under the nose of the PRC on Bitcoin and they'll have no idea what's happening, I've got tokenized ownership of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge [1] to sell you. Those transactions are prosecution futures. They know exactly what they were for, they were letting you make them, and if you're a dissident, look out.
Physical, offline cash is the only true decentralized, censorship resistant peer-to-peer payment method that's difficult to trace. If you believe in privacy, let's throw some weight behind Rohan Grey's ecash. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge
[2] https://ecashact.us
Bitcoin is uncontrollable by the government but that doesn't mean the government isn't following your every step on the blockchain. They'll let you play with your internet coins as long as you behave but if they've got it out for you, either because you're a criminal or because they're oppressive, you can't rely on the blockchain to protect you. Physical money in your wallet is far more private than any other common form of blockchain currency (which is why many countries are trying to limit how much physical cash you can have on you).
They're arguing that Lightning transactions offer substantially more privacy.