> allows anyone to participate in the process of verifying transactions and earning Bitcoin?
Homeless people living under a bridge have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin as SV tech bros running racks of ASIC miners in their three car garages?
That's funny, but no. I could apply the standard of a homeless person buying a $300K McMansion in the same way and it'd be equally unachievable (of course you know that, but you're not concerned about being correct—you just want to look smart).
And yet you suggest a homeless person can reasonably assert influence on the Blockchain and mine it effectively. I'm generally not considered poor (not trying to flex) but there's practically no way I could mine anything of value or exert any amount of influence on the Blockchain. Much less any other random person out there.
Bitcoin is dominated by extremely wealthy miners. The only way it comes close to profitability mine is to get into big industrial power plans and buy tons of highly specified computing equipment. Only then are you breaking even (eventually, after the years of paying off the capex). But then you'll finally have a tiny billionth of the overall network speed and can make a tiny wave in choosing what transactions to include and push the chain any particular direction. It's practically democracy but you can pay $5 to vote again and can do it however many times you want, meanwhile lots of people pre-purchased votes at $0.50/ea and bought millions already. Sounds like a level playing field to me!
> And yet you suggest a homeless person can reasonably assert influence on the Blockchain and mine it effectively.
I never suggested anything even close to that.
> Bitcoin is dominated by extremely wealthy miners.
No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy (making it more accessible to more people). That means it's both cheaper to get the equipment you need and easier to earn Bitcoin. What's great is that's by design.
> But then you'll finally have a tiny billionth of the overall network speed and can make a tiny wave in choosing what transactions to include and push the chain any particular direction. It's practically democracy but you can pay $5 to vote again and can do it however many times you want, meanwhile lots of people pre-purchased votes at $0.50/ea and bought millions already. Sounds like a level playing field to me!
This reads like you don't understand how Bitcoin works. I really don't know what you're referring to here. The network operates according to the current consensus around the protocol. If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal and if others want to support it, your changes can be implemented as an upgrade. There is zero prerequisite to spend anything to participate in Bitcoin. If you can offer a product or service to someone and are willing to be paid in Bitcoin, you just participated in Bitcoin. Just like every economy, the more you participate, the more opportunity you have.
You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence and get bitcoin as a SV tech bro with racks of mining rigs in their garage. Its just a few comments ago.
> No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy
A few miners shut down. The difficulty barely moved. Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Leaving...those with extremely cheap energy sources (i.e., not residential rates, i.e., industrial plans, i.e., using lots of power total, i.e....big miners!) or those who have cheap generation sources they've already invested in. How much does a MW of solar panels cost again? How much land does that take up? Sounds easy for someone living under a bridge to put together.
So mining hardware has gotten a lot cheaper huh? Difficulty has dropped a lot? I guess I can mine on my Ryzen 5 2600 CPU then? No? Huh. Maybe my 1070 GPU? No? Huh. Clearly a $2k Macbook Pro M1. Still no? I wonder what a normal used miner goes for these days.
So easily $1,600-$2,255 for a noisy purpose-built box to mine. What's that gonna cost to operate? ~3kW of power usage, at $0.15/kWh, that's ~$10.80/day, assuming you're not spending any extra on cooling. What's my revenue for that 100Th of mining power these days? ~$6.60/day? Cool, so after spending somewhere around $2k on used mining hardware, I'll be generating -$4.20/day in profits when converting back to USD. Wait, that's a minus symbol... Wait, I'll have some losses from pool fees? Now I've got exchange fees as well?
Well at least I'll have generated some bitcoins. How many did I mine my first day? 0.00036715BTC? Over a year I'll have ~0.134, assuming the difficulty doesn't continue its few year history of continuing to go sky high. We'll say BTC is back to ~$20k, that means for that ~$2k capex investment and $3,942 in power costs (ignoring the fact I had to pay to have space to put the things and might have needed to cool them) I'll have generated ~$2,680.
Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. That guy living under the bridge is gonna be able to mine so many bitcoins.
> If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal
I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. In the end, Bitcoin is what the miners want it to be.
> You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence
No, I didn't. You said "have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin" to which I said yes. You reworded what I said, disingenuously, to force an incredibly weak argument.
> Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either.
Ah, there it is. It's not about other people, it's about you. Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin.
> Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in.
Do normal people participate in SWIFT? No. That's the level Bitcoin is operating on. But it doesn't exclude them from transacting in the currencies that rely on SWIFT as a network.
> I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over.
And they likely will with this attitude. And yes, their ideas didn't gain traction so they ended up forking, and lo and behold, it didn't work. Those experiments were failures. The system works.
> Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin.
"If you want to vote in a nation where only landowners vote, go offer services and/or products and earn land."
Yes. Your opinion is irrelevant if you're not contributing to the whole in some way (no matter how small). It's beautiful and immediately removes the potential for parasites to thrive. That's why government/statists hate it so much. They can't just steal from people under false pretenses and have to actually provide value or something of merit (which they can't do, because they've invested their entire being into parasitism).
> It seems like you may have a lot of vested interest in BTC.
Not really. I'd like to see it succeed, though, as it can help a lot of people.
> I have friends who have lost a lot of money to various schemes, and they sounded just like you sound here when I tried to talk to them about it
I've lost no money on Bitcoin and I've been in it since ~2013 (I do a simple dollar cost averaging scheme to do a daily buy and when I can, accept it as payment for my services). I have a deep disdain for MLM schemes. I don't "need" it to be true, I'd like it to be true.
If people fail to "get it," I'm not going to have an existential crisis. At worst, it will just confirm my suspicion that the majority of the world's population lacks the intelligence to free themselves from tyranny (ironically, by design via state education) and are forever-destined to be enslaved. I'll still be in my backyard picking vegetables. Might even have a soda. Or I'll be in some dystopian prison singing Promised Land [1] by Elvis Presley and throwing my shit at the wall.
You can literally buy votes with capital. What a ridiculous system (and extremely undemocratic, btw!)
Guess what? People who don't own land still contribute towards society.
It seems like you may have a lot of vested interest in BTC. If so, that is very clearly clouding your judgement on this issue.
I have friends who have lost a lot of money to various schemes, and they sounded just like you sound here when I tried to talk to them about it (from MLM to crypto yield scams to penny stock newsletters) - they lacked the capability to criticize it b/c they needed it to be true.
> Your opinion is irrelevant if you're not contributing to the whole in some way (no matter how small).
"Fuck the poor."
I'm glad we got this far. "Oh it is democratic" to "yeah poor people are parasites who deserve to be crushed under my boot" in like six comments. Be honest and start there next time.
The only effective way to "vote" in the Bitcoin world is to mine. The only way to mine is to be wealthy, as I've established here. The only way to be wealthy is to not be poor. Otherwise, you're just sending a letter to the lords to maybe adjust how the system works. Just being a vendor that accepts Bitcoin is the same as just taking USD and hoping the Federal Reserve moves in your interests. You're exerting the same controls overall. In the end, some outside group you have little to no control over has influence in the Monopoly bucks you're trading in. Just in one case, its the miners/exchanges (global markets for BTC). In the other, the Federal Reserve/US Government/the global market for dollars.
Otherwise, making a lemonade stand or making a facebook post is the same as the right to vote in the United States.
If I'm wrong about how providing services in BTC is different in terms of providing services in USD as an example of exerting democratic forces in the currency feel free to share. I'm definitely down for more examination in the topic, but from what I see so far it doesn't seem like Bitcoin is democratic or disconnected from large capital interests than USD in the end.
At least with USD there's some loosely disconnected system from the people I vote for to the people actually appointed to the levers, in BTC its just the people who managed to buy the good mining hardware a few years ago or who manages to find a more efficient way to compute SHA hashes next year.
Homeless people living under a bridge have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin as SV tech bros running racks of ASIC miners in their three car garages?