16 ms·

Man, this is just weird. I just bought 0.05 Bitcoins (you know FOMO and all that) and it just feels so much more empty than back in the days when I mined them m

by mads 9y ago

Man, this is just weird. I just bought 0.05 Bitcoins (you know FOMO and all that) and it just feels so much more empty than back in the days when I mined them myself with my brand new dual Xeon CPU and later on was thinking grand thoughts and building little projects with epaper ink displays to display QR codes on small devices that would work on low bandwidth connections and maybe offline. Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress and scams everywhere and people being all religious about Bitcoin. Every man for themselves and to the moon... These days I am even getting scam calls from something called the Bitcoin Academy with people cheering in the background, when it reaches the all time high. No kidding... I have no idea what to do with my 0.05 BTC. Just let them sit there, I guess as a curiosity of old days. I don't really feel that I fit into the moon community and I don't really feel I want to build anything around this tech just because it is not about tech anymore. Had lots of Bitcoin sift through my hands. Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? Those were the times. Sincerely, One of the first 1000 users of MtGox (proof in the leaked MtGox database :P)

megaman22 9y ago
Shit, somebody gave me 0.05 BTC a few years ago to go to a talk about what it was all about. Hopefully I still have that paper wallet, it must be worth close to $500
- mads 9y ago
  Sounds about right. I paid 500 euros for my 0.05BTC piece of history (there were some fees and all that of course). Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..
- ashark 9y ago
  I got .20-someodd (.28, maybe? Maybe have even been in the .3 range.) years ago from spigots and a very brief experiment with mining, then thoughtlessly formatted right over the damn hard drive with the wallet on it and went "oh well, not like it's worth anything". Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a shot on all my old hard drives (I forgot which one it was long ago, which is part of why it hasn't been worth it so far).
  - mads 9y ago
    After I upgraded, I gave my Xeon Workstation to my Mother and actually kept the miner running when I gave it to her. She complained it was a bit slow, when she used Photoshop, so I turned the miner off and she was happy. There must have been something like 300 or 400 coins in that wallet. I should ask her if she still has it next time I see her, but I am pretty sure she threw it in the garbage.
    - ISL 9y ago
      If it exists, you should ask her today. 300 coins is ~$3M.
  - makomk 9y ago
    Probably. I actually wrote one about half a decade ago, though I'm not sure how well it works with recent or really old versions of the software: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0
- hackermailman 9y ago
  I went through all my old blockchain.info temporary wallets from 2014 in gmail the other day to collect the spare change I left in them at the time that is now worth $2k. Took 9hrs to confirm moving them, which is ridiculous. Guess it's time to switch to Monero or Zcash for use as a currency.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Twisell 9y ago
  That would actually be hilarious if a suffisent number of geeks tried to cash in the bitcoin that is dormant somewhere massively and at the exact same time. This could well end the Ponzi scheme in a victorious way because people that mined them from almost nothing could extract a lot of real money from people (mostly speculators) who bought recently while totally tanking the valuation. Wait... maybe that was always the plan... Is bitcoin actually a huge planned «Robin Hood» bubble?
varbo 9y ago
I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time. Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.
- cdiddy2 9y ago
  gemini?
- wmf 9y ago
  Isn't Gemini 0.25%?
  - jdironman 9y ago
    I just tried registering with them and the reg page is down for maintenance.
  - ohhhlol 9y ago
    yes or lower, https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/ https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/
- chmpgne 9y ago
  Bitcoin itself is being harmed by the core developers who refuse to do anything to address the insane fees: bitcoin needs more bandwidth and throughput in its blocks, classic supply and demand. Bitcoin cash or something like etherium are worth a look at. Bitcoin cash, as the name implies, holds the value that bitcoin should be able to be used as electronic cash.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    No one is interested in the centralized bcash. It is a crypto in name only.
    - qsucvatz 9y ago
swalsh 9y ago
I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles (which admittedly is when the majority of people get in), it's been pretty good at more or less maintaining its value. As a non-physical thing, it's a good place to go when you're not sure about where to put your money. That used to be the role of the dollar, but this is a good alternative that has cheaper forex fees. I think the long-term value of bitcoin will not be buying groceries, but storing money while you wait for your the storm your grocery stores currency is in to subside. Probably not relevant to Americans right now, but I'm sure some people in Latin America can see the value.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  > But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. It's got a pretty short, volatile history to be deciding that.
  - zzzzzzzza 9y ago
    also much more difficult for average person or even gigantic corporation to secure than a physical good e.g. gold. And coins change over time with forks n crap, gold just stays gold.
    - nicky0 9y ago
      It's very easy to secure. Just generate a private key offline and never tell it to anyone.
      - y4mi 9y ago
        Gold is very easy to secure. Just dig a hole and throw it in. Nobody will find it if you don't tell anyone about it. Seriously! A digital key is NOT easier to secure than a physical one. If anything, it's harder. Gold only becomes hard to store if we're talking about huge quantities
jchanimal 9y ago
Shameless plug for my project from back in the everything is possible days. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin Please can we move beyond commodity currency?
Havoc 9y ago
Yeah I think I purchased a month of VPN with like half a bitcoin. Oops. Hindsight 20/20 I guess
- andrewwharton 9y ago
  I've said it before and I'll say it again. We've been cruising past orders of magnitude ($0.10 > $1 > $10 > $100 > $1000 > $10000) and at any one of those jumps it seemed like the top of a bubble and just as likely to go in the opposite direction with the same velocity. Don't kick yourself for spending when you did, because as I'm sure you're aware, it's just as likely that you could be now saying "Thank goodness I used those Bitcoins when they still worth something". I bought a bunch at ~$1, then they jumped to $10 and it started to be fun, because I had a bunch more value to play with, then they jumped to $100, I thought screw this. This is not why I bought them and if they keep up this volatility, then they're not going to be useful for what I want to use them for (ie. buying/selling online). I don't regret selling them when I did, and I don't think you should either.
  - copperx 9y ago
    "I don't regret being a millionaire, and you shouldn't either."
    - chrisan 9y ago
      Its still the right attitude to have or else every hindsight choice is going to be regret, and we'll be talking trillionaires. No one can predict the future. It could have gone down to 0.10 instead of up to 1000. Should everyone buy in now and expect the value to go up to 20k?
    - andrewwharton 9y ago
      You can't judge the quality of decisions you made in the past based on what you know now. Imagine going to a casino, putting $100 on red in the roulette wheel, black coming up and then thinking, "Man, I really regret putting it on red, I should have put it on black". How is that in any way useful or going to improve future decisions? Bet on black, because you know, that's where the trend line is going? Case in point: Do you short Bitcoin now or not? Who freaking knows...
ohhhlol 9y ago
> Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network edit: -3 in an hour, why?
- schmichael 9y ago
  Segwit is used in a small fraction of transactions[0] and SegWit2x was cancelled. While the price has skyrocketed the actual transaction rate has barely moved[1]. [0] http://segwit.party/charts/ http://segwit.party/charts/ [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?timespan=all&daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?times...
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    All that demonstrates is that people dont care that much about txn fees. If they did, they would create segwit wallets.
    - schmichael 9y ago
      Combined with the low transaction rate I would assume people don't care about Bitcoin as currency -- only as a rapidly appreciating asset. As long as the price keeps skyrocketing why would you ever spend any unless you had no other currency?
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        Not really. I have a bitcoin debit card. This essentially puts the money in my wallet into bitcoin. The way bitcoin has been doing over the past year, all it does is make everything reduce in price relative to the time I put the money in the wallet.
    - qsucvatz 9y ago
      How can we count votes of people who don't have the money for a single transaction fee? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better because it was the cheapest?
DennisP 9y ago
I also remember the early Bitcoin days. I didn't get any until over $100 but I came across it before it was worth anything. I remember the faucets, the alpaca socks, the triumphant day when a bitcoin reached parity with a dollar, all of it. It was a glorious, happy community of idealists back then. Those days are gone for Bitcoin, but I've found a cryptocurrency community elsewhere that reminds me of those early Bitcoin days. I jumped in full-time and I'm having a blast.
- pera 9y ago
  Which community?
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Ethereum. Admittedly there's a dark side of scammy ICOs, but there's also lots of open source coding and idealists trying to change the world. I don't think Ethereum is the only cryptocurrency community like this, it's just the one I'm involved in.
    - detailyang 9y ago
      Ethereum community is so cool, I envy you can join it with full time:)
      - DennisP 9y ago
        What's stopping you?
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      > idealists > hard fork because people didn't want to honor smart contract Does not compute.
      - emsimot 9y ago
        Just because some people have different ideals to yourself doesn't make them any less idealistic.
sbenitoj 9y ago
Have you checked out the Bitcoin Cash community on r/BTC? There’s plenty of hatred for Core developers on there, but there’s also a lot of grassroots projects going on, like the Bitcoin Cash Fund that recently raised about $85k to fund projects that spread adoption of Bitcoin Cash — feels a lot more like the early days. https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-organisation-5cb6692298ab/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...
- lawlessone 9y ago
  Bcash is just a pump and dump
  - sbenitoj 9y ago
    How do you define, specifically, a pump and dump vs a legitimate cryptocurrency?
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > vs a legitimate cryptocurrency Is there such a thing?
Kadin 9y ago
> Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.
- mrb 9y ago
  Miners use less electricity (~15 TWh/yr today) than Christmas decorative lights in the world (probably 20 TWh/yr, of which 6.6 for the US alone according to US DoE). If we can afford to spend that much energy not even on useful lighting—just decorative—surely we can afford to run a transformative financial system such as Bitcoin. The "small country" comparison is deceptive as the energy is equivalent to just a single nuclear power plant: 15 TWh/yr = 1.7 GW http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/
- FranOntanaya 9y ago
  That's the puzzling part. A lot of work has gone into Stake / Mixed proof chains that don't depend on consuming horrendous amounts of energy. There isn't a good reason to expect money not to shift to more efficient ledgers when things settle down.
  - keymone 9y ago
    Proof of work has one big advantage over proof of stake - it makes bitcoin backed by value of infrastructure and energy dedicated to mining it. In contrast with proof of stake there is quite literally nothing at stake.
- keymone 9y ago
  How is that “worse” though? This is free market at work. Energy being spent securing the bitcoin network will always correlate with value of bitcoin. The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation. Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with. As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.
ajdlinux 9y ago
> Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? I logged in to my Coinbase account for the first time in years this week. What was $0.01 worth of Bitcoin from a faucet is now worth $0.20. Incredible ROI!
antonios 9y ago
Lots of things to be improved, but even if nothing changes and Bitcoin is frozen exactly as it is right now, it would provide the best store of value we have for years. This "honeybadger" resilience attribute is rather an advantage for a store of value. Especially now that the big players will get in the game (CME, Nasdaq etc.)
nadam 9y ago
You should not think of bitcoin as a payment network, and do not expect its tech innovate rapidly. It is digital gold. Its most important property is to be secure and battle tested. I think bitcoin will be even bigger than it is now. If you zoom out into hundreds of years timeline, it has a historical significance: to store value in an extremely secure and relatively convenient way without trusting a third party. That is big. Probably will be bigger than 172 billion dollars market cap. It is competing with gold, which is something like $7 trillion. If you are interested in the future of payment, than you should invest into sometinhg like Dash instead, which is specifically designed and marketed for payment. Its price is rising rapidly, but it has not blown up as much as bitcoin yet. I hold an almost equal amount (in dollar value) in Dash as in Bitcoin.
TomK32 9y ago
9999.95 BTC more and I'll send you two pizzas.
argo_ 9y ago
Nostalgia and technology should'nt walk together.

by mads 9y ago

megaman22 9y ago

Shit, somebody gave me 0.05 BTC a few years ago to go to a talk about what it was all about. Hopefully I still have that paper wallet, it must be worth close to $500

mads 9y ago
Sounds about right. I paid 500 euros for my 0.05BTC piece of history (there were some fees and all that of course). Maybe I just bought a piece of something like the Berlin wall and when everything goes to shit and this whole train wreck evolves into something more sane later on in 100 years or whatever, my grand children can sell my 0.05BTC on Sothebys or something :D ..
ashark 9y ago
I got .20-someodd (.28, maybe? Maybe have even been in the .3 range.) years ago from spigots and a very brief experiment with mining, then thoughtlessly formatted right over the damn hard drive with the wallet on it and went "oh well, not like it's worth anything". Don't suppose there are any low-level wallet-finder tools out there in case it hasn't been overwritten? It's finally worth a couple days to give that a shot on all my old hard drives (I forgot which one it was long ago, which is part of why it hasn't been worth it so far).
- mads 9y ago
  After I upgraded, I gave my Xeon Workstation to my Mother and actually kept the miner running when I gave it to her. She complained it was a bit slow, when she used Photoshop, so I turned the miner off and she was happy. There must have been something like 300 or 400 coins in that wallet. I should ask her if she still has it next time I see her, but I am pretty sure she threw it in the garbage.
  - ISL 9y ago
    If it exists, you should ask her today. 300 coins is ~$3M.
- makomk 9y ago
  Probably. I actually wrote one about half a decade ago, though I'm not sure how well it works with recent or really old versions of the software: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0
hackermailman 9y ago
I went through all my old blockchain.info temporary wallets from 2014 in gmail the other day to collect the spare change I left in them at the time that is now worth $2k. Took 9hrs to confirm moving them, which is ridiculous. Guess it's time to switch to Monero or Zcash for use as a currency.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Twisell 9y ago
That would actually be hilarious if a suffisent number of geeks tried to cash in the bitcoin that is dormant somewhere massively and at the exact same time. This could well end the Ponzi scheme in a victorious way because people that mined them from almost nothing could extract a lot of real money from people (mostly speculators) who bought recently while totally tanking the valuation. Wait... maybe that was always the plan... Is bitcoin actually a huge planned «Robin Hood» bubble?

varbo 9y ago

I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time. Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.

cdiddy2 9y ago
gemini?
wmf 9y ago
Isn't Gemini 0.25%?
- jdironman 9y ago
  I just tried registering with them and the reg page is down for maintenance.
- ohhhlol 9y ago
  yes or lower, https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/ https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/
chmpgne 9y ago
Bitcoin itself is being harmed by the core developers who refuse to do anything to address the insane fees: bitcoin needs more bandwidth and throughput in its blocks, classic supply and demand. Bitcoin cash or something like etherium are worth a look at. Bitcoin cash, as the name implies, holds the value that bitcoin should be able to be used as electronic cash.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  No one is interested in the centralized bcash. It is a crypto in name only.
  - qsucvatz 9y ago

swalsh 9y ago

I've always been a negative detractor of bitcoin. But then I realized the problem was it was marketed wrong. As a currency, it's a nightmare of a creation. But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. As long as you don't buy in at one of the speculative bubbles (which admittedly is when the majority of people get in), it's been pretty good at more or less maintaining its value. As a non-physical thing, it's a good place to go when you're not sure about where to put your money. That used to be the role of the dollar, but this is a good alternative that has cheaper forex fees. I think the long-term value of bitcoin will not be buying groceries, but storing money while you wait for your the storm your grocery stores currency is in to subside. Probably not relevant to Americans right now, but I'm sure some people in Latin America can see the value.

ceejayoz 9y ago
> But as a store of value, it's actually pretty good. It's got a pretty short, volatile history to be deciding that.
- zzzzzzzza 9y ago
  also much more difficult for average person or even gigantic corporation to secure than a physical good e.g. gold. And coins change over time with forks n crap, gold just stays gold.
  - nicky0 9y ago
    It's very easy to secure. Just generate a private key offline and never tell it to anyone.
    - y4mi 9y ago
      Gold is very easy to secure. Just dig a hole and throw it in. Nobody will find it if you don't tell anyone about it. Seriously! A digital key is NOT easier to secure than a physical one. If anything, it's harder. Gold only becomes hard to store if we're talking about huge quantities

jchanimal 9y ago

Shameless plug for my project from back in the everything is possible days. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin Please can we move beyond commodity currency?

Havoc 9y ago

Yeah I think I purchased a month of VPN with like half a bitcoin. Oops. Hindsight 20/20 I guess

andrewwharton 9y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We've been cruising past orders of magnitude ($0.10 > $1 > $10 > $100 > $1000 > $10000) and at any one of those jumps it seemed like the top of a bubble and just as likely to go in the opposite direction with the same velocity. Don't kick yourself for spending when you did, because as I'm sure you're aware, it's just as likely that you could be now saying "Thank goodness I used those Bitcoins when they still worth something". I bought a bunch at ~$1, then they jumped to $10 and it started to be fun, because I had a bunch more value to play with, then they jumped to $100, I thought screw this. This is not why I bought them and if they keep up this volatility, then they're not going to be useful for what I want to use them for (ie. buying/selling online). I don't regret selling them when I did, and I don't think you should either.
- copperx 9y ago
  "I don't regret being a millionaire, and you shouldn't either."
  - chrisan 9y ago
    Its still the right attitude to have or else every hindsight choice is going to be regret, and we'll be talking trillionaires. No one can predict the future. It could have gone down to 0.10 instead of up to 1000. Should everyone buy in now and expect the value to go up to 20k?
  - andrewwharton 9y ago
    You can't judge the quality of decisions you made in the past based on what you know now. Imagine going to a casino, putting $100 on red in the roulette wheel, black coming up and then thinking, "Man, I really regret putting it on red, I should have put it on black". How is that in any way useful or going to improve future decisions? Bet on black, because you know, that's where the trend line is going? Case in point: Do you short Bitcoin now or not? Who freaking knows...

ohhhlol 9y ago

> Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Not true, see Segwit recently, soon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network edit: -3 in an hour, why?

schmichael 9y ago
Segwit is used in a small fraction of transactions[0] and SegWit2x was cancelled. While the price has skyrocketed the actual transaction rate has barely moved[1]. [0] http://segwit.party/charts/ http://segwit.party/charts/ [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?timespan=all&daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second?times...
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  All that demonstrates is that people dont care that much about txn fees. If they did, they would create segwit wallets.
  - schmichael 9y ago
    Combined with the low transaction rate I would assume people don't care about Bitcoin as currency -- only as a rapidly appreciating asset. As long as the price keeps skyrocketing why would you ever spend any unless you had no other currency?
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      Not really. I have a bitcoin debit card. This essentially puts the money in my wallet into bitcoin. The way bitcoin has been doing over the past year, all it does is make everything reduce in price relative to the time I put the money in the wallet.
  - qsucvatz 9y ago
    How can we count votes of people who don't have the money for a single transaction fee? I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better because it was the cheapest?

DennisP 9y ago

I also remember the early Bitcoin days. I didn't get any until over $100 but I came across it before it was worth anything. I remember the faucets, the alpaca socks, the triumphant day when a bitcoin reached parity with a dollar, all of it. It was a glorious, happy community of idealists back then. Those days are gone for Bitcoin, but I've found a cryptocurrency community elsewhere that reminds me of those early Bitcoin days. I jumped in full-time and I'm having a blast.

pera 9y ago
Which community?
- DennisP 9y ago
  Ethereum. Admittedly there's a dark side of scammy ICOs, but there's also lots of open source coding and idealists trying to change the world. I don't think Ethereum is the only cryptocurrency community like this, it's just the one I'm involved in.
  - detailyang 9y ago
    Ethereum community is so cool, I envy you can join it with full time:)
    - DennisP 9y ago
      What's stopping you?
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > idealists > hard fork because people didn't want to honor smart contract Does not compute.
    - emsimot 9y ago
      Just because some people have different ideals to yourself doesn't make them any less idealistic.

sbenitoj 9y ago

Have you checked out the Bitcoin Cash community on r/BTC? There’s plenty of hatred for Core developers on there, but there’s also a lot of grassroots projects going on, like the Bitcoin Cash Fund that recently raised about $85k to fund projects that spread adoption of Bitcoin Cash — feels a lot more like the early days. https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://thebitcoincash.fund/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-organisation-5cb6692298ab/ https://www.yours.org/content/a-new-model-for-bcf-project-or...

lawlessone 9y ago
Bcash is just a pump and dump
- sbenitoj 9y ago
  How do you define, specifically, a pump and dump vs a legitimate cryptocurrency?
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > vs a legitimate cryptocurrency Is there such a thing?

Kadin 9y ago

> Lots of problems to be solved back then, but Bitcoin is just the same now. Nothing was solved. No progress Oh, it's way worse than that. Now, a small country's worth of electricity is consumed every day to no end at all, except "mining" Bitcoins.

mrb 9y ago
Miners use less electricity (~15 TWh/yr today) than Christmas decorative lights in the world (probably 20 TWh/yr, of which 6.6 for the US alone according to US DoE). If we can afford to spend that much energy not even on useful lighting—just decorative—surely we can afford to run a transformative financial system such as Bitcoin. The "small country" comparison is deceptive as the energy is equivalent to just a single nuclear power plant: 15 TWh/yr = 1.7 GW http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/
FranOntanaya 9y ago
That's the puzzling part. A lot of work has gone into Stake / Mixed proof chains that don't depend on consuming horrendous amounts of energy. There isn't a good reason to expect money not to shift to more efficient ledgers when things settle down.
- keymone 9y ago
  Proof of work has one big advantage over proof of stake - it makes bitcoin backed by value of infrastructure and energy dedicated to mining it. In contrast with proof of stake there is quite literally nothing at stake.
keymone 9y ago
How is that “worse” though? This is free market at work. Energy being spent securing the bitcoin network will always correlate with value of bitcoin. The end is existence of bitcoin as solution to fairly important problem of decentralized and censorship-resistant consensus mechanism over open ledger that everybody can transfer value within (and soon with convenient atomic swaps - across multiple chains). And that is just the lowest layer of operation. Anybody claiming bitcoin mining is wasting energy assumes the solution to said problem is worthless or the problem doesn’t exist. Both of which I (and the market) disagree with. As for whether there could be more “efficient” way to line bitcoins - this is irrelevant, because for every jump in efficiency there will be similar jump in mining difficulty by design.

ajdlinux 9y ago

> Anyone remember the Bitcoin faucets? I logged in to my Coinbase account for the first time in years this week. What was $0.01 worth of Bitcoin from a faucet is now worth $0.20. Incredible ROI!

antonios 9y ago

Lots of things to be improved, but even if nothing changes and Bitcoin is frozen exactly as it is right now, it would provide the best store of value we have for years. This "honeybadger" resilience attribute is rather an advantage for a store of value. Especially now that the big players will get in the game (CME, Nasdaq etc.)

nadam 9y ago

You should not think of bitcoin as a payment network, and do not expect its tech innovate rapidly. It is digital gold. Its most important property is to be secure and battle tested. I think bitcoin will be even bigger than it is now. If you zoom out into hundreds of years timeline, it has a historical significance: to store value in an extremely secure and relatively convenient way without trusting a third party. That is big. Probably will be bigger than 172 billion dollars market cap. It is competing with gold, which is something like $7 trillion. If you are interested in the future of payment, than you should invest into sometinhg like Dash instead, which is specifically designed and marketed for payment. Its price is rising rapidly, but it has not blown up as much as bitcoin yet. I hold an almost equal amount (in dollar value) in Dash as in Bitcoin.

TomK32 9y ago

9999.95 BTC more and I'll send you two pizzas.

argo_ 9y ago

Nostalgia and technology should'nt walk together.