Well, "crypto" is just Ponzi scams. The more interesting question is why is HN so anti-bitcoin? Looks like they don't get how harmful fiat money is to society and the environment.
One reason might be that HN is just too woke. Probably you even get censored here for saying that men are not women.
well, same could be said for Facebook. Only now, less than 20y later, we're all scrolling through endless feeds and digging comment section trenches of the latest culture wars
I wouldn’t say 20 years later. Facebook was the way of connecting with people you just met even after 10 years after its inception. I would even say, pretty much everyone I knew had a Facebook account in 2010, and it delivered on the claims it made. Whether we agree with their mission is a different topic, but it certainly had an impact on the real world.
Yes it is -- its blockchain is longer. The blockchain with the longest proof-of-work is always the real blockchain, when given multiple competing blockchains to select from.
This is the essence of the Nakamoto Consensus Algorithm, which underpins the entirety of blockchain economics.
there are forks of bitcoin, to be sure... but the majority of "cryptos" out there are GPU mineable coins, because there's hardware that can be exploited to mine "profitably". not to mention the need to pre-mine shitcoins so they can be given to grifters and shills who pump & dump.
The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.
"Can" is doing a lot of work here. I finally got around to playing with Lightning recently, my sense was it's quite a ways away from being ready unless you've got a decent amount of frequent income + spending going through btc. The worst part is it seems poisoned by nodes that want to extract a %-amount fee rather than a flat or bytes-dependent fee. It was actually one US penny more expensive to send a ~$50 lightning transaction via ACINQ (a recommended node that would actually accept opening up a channel) than just sending a normal blockchain transaction, where recently you can pay the minimum 1 sat/byte and get confirmed in not too long.
Lightning has promise but the regular chain is still just fine for many use cases especially for normal people, barring those rare periods of exceptionally high transaction fees. A transaction will typically show up in the mempool "instantly" and for many vendors that's good enough; much like the classic written checks system they can trust the purchaser isn't going to try any funny business before the transaction is fully confirmed/settled and you can let them go on their way with their groceries or coffee or whatever. If they do try something (successfully), well, you're out a small amount (maybe, an intermediary like bitpay may tank those for you), and you ban them from your business. For many other types of transactions, even waiting for at least one transaction but not expecting that for 24 hours from now is fine and impacts nothing. My hope is the effective minimum of 1 sat/byte will be decreased because right now it's 9 cents to send the median sized 224 byte transaction and if btc doubles again to $80k USD then the minimum fee doubles to 18 cents without anything changing, that's like an extra pack of ramen. Well it's still not that bad, especially since it's not amount-dependent; my whole state recently mandated grocery stores start charging 8 cents per plastic bag when they used to be free, many people are just personally tanking it and still throwing them out, but everyone would rather pay no fees if they could.
>Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.
While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding?
And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.
I find the GP's comment tenuous but I also find the environment-damaging rhetoric you and a sibling (and thousands of others) give on proof of work even more so. If you want to bite the bullet and say people shouldn't be able to pay for energy and do with it what they want, fine, but otherwise, price out the actual energy costs, and realize the purpose of such costs: security. Bank of America alone spends $1bn/yr on cybersecurity, bitcoin mining costs the world about ten times that. It's not that unreasonable. Another comparison is it's about 1/8th the US spending on cigarettes.
> Bitcoin being deflationary helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.
>You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.
That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.
No it doesn't. And you are moving goalposts. But still, it's a obvious and transparent lie. It wastes electricity that could have been put to good use, like power2(gas|ammonia|syngas|heat|cooling) or just normal, dispatchable consumption in a Wide area synchronous grid, a thing that exists pretty much everywhere where electricity generation is a thing.
And bitcoin does not use electricity, it just flat out wastes it. And that's not because bitcoin in itself is useless (it is), but due to the design of the Proof-of-Waste. Electricity use implies that electricity is converted into something. Every iPhone uses X Wh. If you dail up the usage, the output increases. It's not perfectly linear, but that's a reasonable approximation. Bitcoin is different: More electricity will never produce a better service, more bitcoins or whatever. Bitcoin will not ever get better by using more. And yet it is designed to waste a amount of electricity proportional to it's price. Oh, and it is only profitable to mine if you use a below-average electricity price. E.g. use the laxes regulations, the most polluting or the most illegal sources of electricity.
Unless this is sarcasm, do you wanna talk about the environmental ramifications of so much work being duplicated and dumped in the bitcoin network? Like, the sheer number of machines and waste heat that comes from nodes who weren't quite fast enough to get the payout, and just had to put all those calculations into /dev/null?
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It makes renewables more profitable because it offers a base price for excess energy. Any place, 24/7.
That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.
Lightning is not Bitcoin. The implemented design of Lightning is a highly centralised off-chain layer 2 [0] which is a direct contradiction and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was designed and built for: ' a peer-to-peer electronic cash system'
Bitcoin has failed in being an efficient on-chain payments system and is somehow now an investment asset since that is its new narrative which is also a 'store of value' or 'digital gold'.
It seems that many supporters have admitted that it is not useful for its original purpose and that it is not instant, significantly slower than VISA and a extremely volatile to use as a currency.
True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed. I can’t really use BTC to store money, as it fluctuates too much.
The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
> True, if I keep my assets in EUR and only convert them to BTC as needed.
What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
> being unable to run a full node anymore
Full node syncs & runs fine even on a raspi 3... it's slow... and you're not participating in mining... but it's running, and does what you would expect a node to do (validate, receive & broadcast transactions).
> What?? The parent was talking about the lightning network... which is built on top of the bitcoin node network.
Yes, but bitcoin is so volatile that you can’t keep money for daily usage in it. You can only use it as long-term investment or ultra-short-term wallet.
The regular usage – storing money for somewhere between one and 30 days – is really painful with bitcoin.
> Or are you saying that holding bitcoin for 1-30 days is "regular usage" ?
Holding money for 1-30 days is regular usage. You get paid, you spend it over a month on wages and expenses.
Bitcoin originally promised to be usable for that. Some companies actually paid you in BTC, some stores actually allowed you to pay with BTC. The original goal was to use BTC like a checking account.
Lightning is great at replacing the BTC network itself for transactions, but it doesn’t help much at allowing BTC to accomplish this original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
This is (roughly speaking) the description of a currency, isn't it? I would point out that as a store of value, bitcoin's up
> [BTC's] original task of matching or exceeding fiat money in actual day to day usability.
I don't think BTC was intended to serve in the way you're describing. I believe it was designed to neuter/obviate at-large Central Banks (e.g. money printers, debasers of currency, economic overlords). In this way, it's gone a long way towards the intended purpose. Furthermore, as a base-layer, it's been extended considerably to support day-to-day usability. Further, as a Store of Value, it's done a lot better than USD in almost every time-scale you can compare, and all the ones that matter.
>>>
The main properties:
Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
No mint or other trusted parties.
Participants can be anonymous.
New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work.
The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the
network to prevent double-spending.
>>>
I would also like to add that the original point of money is not to support a month's worth of planning... the point of money is to support planning across planting seasons and lifetimes. Wages and wage-work came along long after money was invented.
Don't quote the old magic to me, I was there when it was written.
And Bitcoin was treated and hyped as a true replacement for Euro or US Dollar. And we hyped it as well. Online stores started accepting BTC, some companies started paying wages in BTC, the first BTC ATMs showed up.
Dogecoin started their tip bot with a tipping culture.
Neither Doge nor BTC absolutely were seen as investment vehicle or store of value, but instead as payment system and true currency.
I remember discussion about the volatility, and claims that with more and more people using it, its value would change less and less and it'd stabilize at about a BTC per Euro cent.
Even if you set aside the transaction costs and the staggering environmental toll of Bitcoin, it just doesn't function well as a currency because it has been used, and is being used, as a speculative investment vehicle by so many.
You absolutely do not want your currency to be rising and falling by double-digit percentages in value even over the course of a few years, let alone a few days the way Bitcoin frequently does. Furthermore, people accepting currency don't want that. This is one of the major reasons so few people do, in fact, accept Bitcoin as a means of payment. (Yes, I know some do. It's still very few, and always will be.)
I would argue that Bitcoin is already outdated tech so has the only benefit to be the first one. Now you have crypto doing what Bitcoin does, but with instant transactions, feeless, while barely using any energy (think a wind turbine would suffice to maintain the complete network)
Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It accelerates our transition to renewable energies. Bitcoin makes renewable energy sources more profitable because it offers a base price for excess electricity. Any time, any place.
And Bitcoin incentivises having a low time preference. This leads to a much more sustainable consumer behaviour. Bitcoin helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.
It took me quite a while to understand what Bitcoin is about. Of course, decentralised systems are exciting tech, but what's really interesting is that Bitcoin focuses attention onto fundamental questions of society:
- How can we transport value through space at the speed of light?
- How can we transport value through time?
- How can we protect our life savings from inflation?
- How can we develop a free market of currencies which solves the issues of centrally controlled currencies?
- How can we align incentives such that we stop consuming low quality products that produce lots of waste and start valuing high quality products that last for decades?
- In general: How can we, as a society, enjoy the benefits of a low time preference?
Such questions are the reason why I believe Bitcoin is one of the most disruptive technologies of our century.
I started as a hater and skeptic but the more curious I got about the technical details of it and the more I learned, the more it started to grow on me.
What outperforms Bitcoin in terms of decentralization, scalability, and resilience?