If you're in Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. where your government is stealing your savings via massive inflation it's pretty useful.
It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.
If someone figures out a way to do it, then sure. Mining ensures that no one in the system is able to get a new monetary unit below the market price as well as making tampering with past transactions uneconomical. Ultimately it's a very elegant solution to what was a long-standing problem.
The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.
But do people in Venezuela etc. really need all the requirements of Bitcoin? E.g. having to deal with a central authority other than their own government could still be an option.
The most popular method in Venezuela right now is cash-dollars and then zelle transfers, and zelle is only available to those who have overseas bank accounts, everybody else is mostly screwed.
Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.
Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.
I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.
And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).
So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become
Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.
Maybe they do maybe they don't, it's impossible to tell other people what they need. The best you can do is educate them on the options you think could help, people will ultimately make their own decisions.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.
The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.
Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.
Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.
This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.
I think both can be true. Specifically, Bitcoin mining would itself encourage greater energy production; it doesn't merely skim off the excess energy, as you suggest. It generates its own market forces, it's not merely floating above them.
While that's plausible, I'd still agree with the parent comment in general -- it's true that it's not cost-effective to mine using fossil fuels (you would lose money doing it), and this alone requires a different way of talking about the issue.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.
The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.
Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.
Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.
This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.
That is full of broken assumptions and excuses. Bitcoin mining drives up the cost of those "waste" energy forms.
Excess hydro capacity can be used for electrolysis to hydrogen, hydrogen can also be produced from flared gas. Which can then be used to produce low-carbon-emission steel with hydrogen as a reduction agent.
Bitcoin mining makes all that more expensive, less likely and risky, because setting up a few miners is quick and easy. Running a steel mill or electrolysis plant is expensive and longterm. Too risky if bitcoin miners might buy all the cheap intermittent power you planned with.
You can't drive up the cost of "waste", all you can do is use it such that the waste is decreased. If people want to make hydrogen with it they should do so. As I said, the Bitcoin network is not capable of bidding for energy at higher prices.
Your argument boils down to: why aren't people doing this uneconomically viable thing that I think is better than this other economically viable thing.
Think of all the useful productive things that you could do with all that precious time and energy you personally waste by shilling and hyping Bitcoin. You could take a nice walk. You could pat your dog. You could take a bath. You could write a poem that makes somebody smile. You could write a computer program that solves somebody's problem. Find something productive and constructive to do with you life and the limited time and energy you have here on Earth, instead of wasting your energy shilling and mining Bitcoin.
Oh, give me a break. Get over your delusions of grandeur that you're "without a doubt" such an essential savior of the future of humanity. The last thing humanity needs is yet another Bitcoin shill, making baseless arguments full of broken assumptions and excuses that ignore the science and the facts, and encourage pollution and global warming and fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid scams.
Preposterous logic. Any energy used has to be made up with other sources. The idea that all bitcoin miners are public-spirited eco-warriors is pure imagination.
Rather than venting greenhouse gases produced from the oil and gas mining process, they use it to mine Bitcoin. Sure this results in some CO2, but that's a lot better than venting straight methane.
It's not like excess hydro power in China is stored anywhere. It's literally wasted.. why do you care if people use it to mine bitcoin? How is it cutting in to the energy that other people can use?
The mental overhead of switching between - and keeping track of - messaging apps shouldn't be ignored.
Speaking from experience, I have a hard time remembering which specific platform is preferred by specific contacts. It's a minor annoyance, but it's always present.
How many messenger apps do you run, and how many is too many?
For me, the limit is 2. Note that currently I am forced to keep 5 different apps to keep in touch with my contacts.
> sexual exploitation, human trafficking, modern day slavery, organ trafficking, high value thefts (petrol, or digits bank robberies), standard social engineering scams etc
That kind of logic can be used to justify putting government cameras and microphones inside everyone's homes too.
Having laws requiring the state to get a warrant from a court to conduct a search, is not an extreme. Instituting warrantless mass-surveillance, like monitoring every transaction above a certain size, is the extreme.
You’re not wrong. There’s clearly a balance to be made, but financial institutions are good choke point for detecting and preventing a great number of different crimes. After all few engage in criminal behaviour just for fun, without the profit motive most serious crimes just wouldn’t be worth it.
I don’t advocate for wholesale financial surveillance, and I certainly think the rules advocated by FinCEN here are both naive and an overreach.
But I do think banks should have an obligation to detect, prevent and report financial crime, if only to make sure banks don’t become complicit. Providing financial services to criminals is incredibly lucrative, far more than providing services to ordinary consumers.
Sorry you do not understand how the system works. You can't buy 50% because the price would be worth more than all world gdp since each order is incrementally how gher and the supply of coins is not unlimited. Good to dig into things before you mindlessly dismiss them. Did you actually believe that people are designing and talking about Pos as a breakthrough when the main idea is "nobody rich enough will want to buy 50%"?
For newer PoS protocols, they would need over 66% and they would lose money if they misbehaved making it likely uneconomical to do so. This is the big advantage of PoS over PoW. There are both positive incentives (e.g. block rewards) but also negative ones (e.g. getting slashed for trying to stage a double spend attack).
They both want to scale transactions, they just disagree about how. Bitcoin Cash wants much higher transaction throughput at the base layer (i.e. the actual blockchain). While Bitcoin wants the high throughput lower value transactions to happen at layers built on top of the base chain, e.g. Lightning
It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.