
Hate Bitcoin? This might change your mind - pshin45
https://medium.com/@petershin45/hate-bitcoin-this-might-change-your-mind-837963c24d70
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skookum
If you know enough to hate bitcoin then you've likely already heard all the
standard pro-Bitcoin arguments. By now you'd expect a "this will change your
mind" article on the topic to bring up some new angle. Not this one. It's just
the usual suspects ("No fees! No government meddling! Financial power to the
poor!") complete with the standard sprinkling of opinions stated as facts.

How does the author justify wasting bits on this in 2018? The righting of
wrongs: "the result of all this low-quality Bitcoin journalism is that most
newcomers never get to learn about all the new and exciting things made
possible by Bitcoin’s core technology."

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floatboth
> the foundation for a radically new type of financial system

A radically terrible one. The financial system should not waste gigantic
amounts of power on maintaining security under trustlessness. Unlike
libertarians' ridiculous dreams, actual human society _requires trust_.

> This transaction was transmitted and processed instantly, for $0 in fees

No way it's been $0. And it's even worse now. Confirmations are slow, miner
fees are large, exchanges have fees, you can quickly lose on exchange rate…

(Mining rewards are mentioned later in the article… but not where they come
from)

> As the number of independent mining groups increases and becomes more
> geographically dispersed

Still a few large pools dominate the network
[https://blockchain.info/pools](https://blockchain.info/pools)

> [cash] also means that they could be robbed of their entire life savings on
> any given day

There's a whole subreddit, /r/Buttcoin, full of stories of bitcoiners losing
their life savings on any given day. Scams, hacks, bugs, private key losses,
scams, scams, and even more scams.

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Yizahi
Yes I want cheap money transfer internationally and yes, I want a system
capable to undermine authoritarian censorship. But I think that blockchain is
extremely crude and unreliable technology to implement them. It is immutable,
number of nodes (i.e. backups) is unpredictable, its hardware footprint is
insane and will only increase in the future and bitcoin is going to be
essentially centralized, with decisions concentrated in those lightning hubs
and exchanges in offshore locations. I don't believe in the underlying
technology, I think it may succeed but be very limited and not because some
3rd party will demolish it, but just because it is not a magical tech they
claim it is. (and altcoins are mostly even worse in technology department)

Maybe I'm wrong and don't see some really long term perspective, well then
I'll admit it. For now I don't use any of them.

~~~
jacobr
People are looking to solve some of those issues with other currencies. Not
sure if any of the current iterations are good enough, but one example is Nano
[https://nano.org/en/faq](https://nano.org/en/faq)

~~~
imustbeevil
For anyone who doesn't follow altcoins, Nano is a rebranding of Raiblocks to
attempt to reset the pump phase now that everything tanked 40%.

------
jacobr
> With Bitcoin, for the first time in history it’s possible for anyone with an
> internet connection to quickly and securely send any amount of money to
> anyone else, anywhere in the world (or even Mars!), for low or zero fees.

> And this isn’t just theoretical. It happens every day on the Bitcoin
> network.

I'm not 100% convinced about a wide spread adoption of decentralized
cryptocurrencies, but if it is to happen it will be a coin with low or zero
fees. What OP is not honest about is that there are no transactions on the
Bitcoin network with low or zero fees.

~~~
ktpsns
Indeed. In theory we all love bitcoin, but in practice we started to hate it
once the investors came, started to speculate with it and destroy our planet
with absurd energy consumptions. Feels like the Paperclip maximizer gone mad.

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bitconion
Just to feel SWIFT in some Europian countries: for $17 fee is about $72, and
sometime it took about 2 weeks for confirmation maybe because of weekend
days... plus all those warnings about the purpose etc... absolutely not user
friendly input fields... BTC is simply manna of heaven comparing with that

