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You have proposed a false dilemma. It is entirely for the technology to be valid and useful with enormous potential AND for the current coin bubble to be a mass

You have proposed a false dilemma. It is entirely for the technology to be valid and useful with enormous potential AND for the current coin bubble to be a massive pyramid scheme on a scale never-before seen in history. Tulips are still very pretty flowers. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

mirimir 9y ago
Sure, but I can't lease servers anonymously with tulip bulbs. If for no other reason, because they're physical objects. Maybe with tulip futures, or whatever, but I digress. I've followed discussions of anonymous electronic currency since the 90s. Nothing introduced before Bitcoin has survived. The main defect was centralization, which allowed government take-down. If I've missed one, please share. And about the bubble thing, I don't much care. The Bitcoin price has seen times of huge volatility. The increase during 2017 from ~$1000 to almost $20000 was impressive. As was the collapse during first quarter 2018. But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough. And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
- wklauss 9y ago
  > But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough. Great. Is this system that provides, so far, minimal to no advantage over other transaction systems worth expending the same electric power that a small developed country (Portugal) uses?
  - mirimir 9y ago
    If you know another way to make anonymous payments, please share. I had a Liberty Reserve account, but they got busted. I have a Pecunix account, but it's not accepted anywhere. If I were wealthy, I could setup shell corporations and so on. But I'm not. I do agree that a system that used less energy would be better. When it's available, and widely enough accepted, I'll switch.
    - mamon 9y ago
      If you think that Bitcoin transactions are anonymous then you are grossly mistaken. All transactions are part of PUBLIC ledger and are there to stay forever. The illusion of anonimity comes from thr fact that you don’t need an ID to create a Bitcoin wallet, but still it’s possible to trace your transactions back to you.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Well, it may or may not be possible. The ledger may record a series of transactions like A → B → C → D → E, and you may know that A belongs to Joe and E to Mary, but it's not certain that you can know whether B, C and D are decoys created by one of them (and so they actually transacted directly) or if they're other people and the money simply circulated. There are techniques to try to find that out, but they're not infallible.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        From my parent comment: > And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me. So yes, usably anonymous.
        yesforwhat 9y ago
        You can also launder money after swapping it, doesn't make it anonymous either.
        freeone3000 9y ago
        Engage the services of your local money launderer, they're doing the same thing. Wait, you're saying they're criminals? I wonder why the bitcoin guys aren't.
        mirimir 9y ago
  - scalesolved 9y ago
    This is a genuine question with no snark intended (sometimes we need to clarify stuff like this on the internet hah). What's the overall energy expenditure for all fiat production,maintenance, asset storage (gold), mining of assets etc? There are some interesting developments in the crypto sphere moving away from high energy proof or work to a holding system (Proof of stake).
    - mirimir 9y ago
      I have no clue. But I don't doubt that systems as energy-intensive as Bitcoin would consume far more energy. Likely, orders of magnitude more. I like to think of myself as caring about ecosystems. But after decades of work on decentralized electronic payment systems, Bitcoin is what we got. I'm no expert, but I suspect that the Bitcoin protocol could be tweaked to make humongous mining operations unprofitable. But the chances of that are likely not so great. I do hope that proof-of-stake systems will develop. Stake still means wealth, but at least it's not wealth that's funding energy-intensive proof-of-work.
decentralised 9y ago
Again with the tulip bulbs? Surely you've had the time to research this argument by now...
- wklauss 9y ago
  > Again with the tulip bulbs? Surely you've had the time to research this argument by now... The real intricacies of tulip mania don't matter. Who cares if it was not exactly the bubble we thought it was? It was still a bubble, with serious consequences to those exposed to it. Yes, it didn't move at the speed of the markets move now because markets then were much more slower and it only affected a bunch of businessmen. So what? We use the analogy because we know markets sometimes go crazy around stocks and other assets, with no apparent justification other than thinking the price will continue to grow and usually based on not much more than faith. Tulip mania has become a proxy for that behavior because the absurdity of a flower bulb skyrocketing in price, but if you don't like it, you can certainly point to many bubbles we know existed, had more widespread effects and were equally based on nothing. Some of them are not even a decade old.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    Bubble or not: at $330bn, even if this all goes to $0 tomorrow, the world won't burn. If this asset class would be trading at $10tn then the concerns would likely be valid. Why not put a bit of money into the space and let things develop? If you're right, great, you haven't lost a lot. If you were wrong, you made a healthy return that is likely above any other investments you have access to.
    - gleenn 9y ago
      At a incredibly high and volatile risk for what you're paying. Try and pull some of those Bitcoins out in a market rush, see if you're sale goes through in the next week. Even the high returns we've seen so far don't justify the fact that sometimes you're asset is worth nothing because you can't move it because some company "has a bug".

mirimir 9y ago

Sure, but I can't lease servers anonymously with tulip bulbs. If for no other reason, because they're physical objects. Maybe with tulip futures, or whatever, but I digress. I've followed discussions of anonymous electronic currency since the 90s. Nothing introduced before Bitcoin has survived. The main defect was centralization, which allowed government take-down. If I've missed one, please share. And about the bubble thing, I don't much care. The Bitcoin price has seen times of huge volatility. The increase during 2017 from ~$1000 to almost $20000 was impressive. As was the collapse during first quarter 2018. But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough. And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.

wklauss 9y ago
> But now the price seems relatively stable at $7000-$9000. And payments go through quickly enough. Great. Is this system that provides, so far, minimal to no advantage over other transaction systems worth expending the same electric power that a small developed country (Portugal) uses?
- mirimir 9y ago
  If you know another way to make anonymous payments, please share. I had a Liberty Reserve account, but they got busted. I have a Pecunix account, but it's not accepted anywhere. If I were wealthy, I could setup shell corporations and so on. But I'm not. I do agree that a system that used less energy would be better. When it's available, and widely enough accepted, I'll switch.
  - mamon 9y ago
    If you think that Bitcoin transactions are anonymous then you are grossly mistaken. All transactions are part of PUBLIC ledger and are there to stay forever. The illusion of anonimity comes from thr fact that you don’t need an ID to create a Bitcoin wallet, but still it’s possible to trace your transactions back to you.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Well, it may or may not be possible. The ledger may record a series of transactions like A → B → C → D → E, and you may know that A belongs to Joe and E to Mary, but it's not certain that you can know whether B, C and D are decoys created by one of them (and so they actually transacted directly) or if they're other people and the money simply circulated. There are techniques to try to find that out, but they're not infallible.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      From my parent comment: > And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me. So yes, usably anonymous.
      - yesforwhat 9y ago
        You can also launder money after swapping it, doesn't make it anonymous either.
      - freeone3000 9y ago
        Engage the services of your local money launderer, they're doing the same thing. Wait, you're saying they're criminals? I wonder why the bitcoin guys aren't.
        mirimir 9y ago
- scalesolved 9y ago
  This is a genuine question with no snark intended (sometimes we need to clarify stuff like this on the internet hah). What's the overall energy expenditure for all fiat production,maintenance, asset storage (gold), mining of assets etc? There are some interesting developments in the crypto sphere moving away from high energy proof or work to a holding system (Proof of stake).
  - mirimir 9y ago
    I have no clue. But I don't doubt that systems as energy-intensive as Bitcoin would consume far more energy. Likely, orders of magnitude more. I like to think of myself as caring about ecosystems. But after decades of work on decentralized electronic payment systems, Bitcoin is what we got. I'm no expert, but I suspect that the Bitcoin protocol could be tweaked to make humongous mining operations unprofitable. But the chances of that are likely not so great. I do hope that proof-of-stake systems will develop. Stake still means wealth, but at least it's not wealth that's funding energy-intensive proof-of-work.

decentralised 9y ago

Again with the tulip bulbs? Surely you've had the time to research this argument by now...

wklauss 9y ago
> Again with the tulip bulbs? Surely you've had the time to research this argument by now... The real intricacies of tulip mania don't matter. Who cares if it was not exactly the bubble we thought it was? It was still a bubble, with serious consequences to those exposed to it. Yes, it didn't move at the speed of the markets move now because markets then were much more slower and it only affected a bunch of businessmen. So what? We use the analogy because we know markets sometimes go crazy around stocks and other assets, with no apparent justification other than thinking the price will continue to grow and usually based on not much more than faith. Tulip mania has become a proxy for that behavior because the absurdity of a flower bulb skyrocketing in price, but if you don't like it, you can certainly point to many bubbles we know existed, had more widespread effects and were equally based on nothing. Some of them are not even a decade old.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Bubble or not: at $330bn, even if this all goes to $0 tomorrow, the world won't burn. If this asset class would be trading at $10tn then the concerns would likely be valid. Why not put a bit of money into the space and let things develop? If you're right, great, you haven't lost a lot. If you were wrong, you made a healthy return that is likely above any other investments you have access to.
  - gleenn 9y ago
    At a incredibly high and volatile risk for what you're paying. Try and pull some of those Bitcoins out in a market rush, see if you're sale goes through in the next week. Even the high returns we've seen so far don't justify the fact that sometimes you're asset is worth nothing because you can't move it because some company "has a bug".